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This page in a nutshell: This was a
Request for comment on
paid editing. No clear consensus emerged from the discussion.
Rootology's opening view was that motivation for editing is not important, it is the end result of that editing - the content - that matters. They asserted that if the content is policy compliant, there shouldn't be a problem, and this viewpoint received 102 support votes, the most of any statement. While there were few other statements directly in favour of paid editing, iridescent felt allowing it would be a net positive because a declaration of intent would reveal potential bias; pfctdayelise pointed out that the German Wikipedia had allowed paid editing; David Shankbone said that existing policies take care of conflict of interest issues; LessHeard vanU felt that we all have an inclination toward bias which the shared editing process would hopefully amalgamate to a neutral point of view, and expressed a common view that editors should reveal any potential bias, such as a relationship with the subject, or a financial gain. Thekohser asserted that most experienced paid content editors are likely producing higher-quality, more compliant content than volunteer editors. The majority of those that offered their own opinion statements felt that paid editing was a conflict of interest which should be discouraged or controlled in some way - Jimbo Wales stated that he would block any user selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, and that he considered it policy not to accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia. Some 66 support votes were cast for this view, the highest among any statement criticizing paid editing. FayssalF suggested a template to identify articles which had been edited by paid editors; YellowMonkey gave an example of a known paid article on a businessman which did not contain details of lawsuits for fraud against the businessman; Fred Bauder felt that endorsement of paid advocacy opened the door to influencing Wikipedia content. A proposal on paid editing exists - Wikipedia:Paid editing |
An RFC on the notion of paid editing.
NOTE: As of the launch time of this RFC, this is not a blockable offense under any policy, or to my knowledge against any explicit policy, but dances around WP:COI in some ways. rootology ( C)( T) 18:20, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
REMINDER TO USE THE TALK PAGE FOR DISCUSSION: All signed comments and talk not related to an endorsement should be directed to this page's discussion page. Discussion should be posted on the talk page. Threaded replies to another user's vote, endorsement, evidence, response, or comment should be posted to the talk page.
If you're interested in this discussion, you may be interested in the page under construction at Wikipedia:Paid editing providing advice and warnings to prospective paid editors.
Users should only edit one summary or view, other than to endorse.
Is paid editing a problem? Is it fine? Is it against policy? What policy? What should be the response?
A start toward consensus on what the community view is on the matter of "paid editing".
This issue essentially boils down to three viewpoints, I feel. I've outlined them below. Please keep comments to one sentence or less!
Users involved in paid editing are banned after a yet-to-be-decided number of warnings.
Users involved in paid editing must, for example, disclose their clients, and submit the article for review by neutral editors in good standing. For example, that is - exact caveats to be decided.
Paid editors are allowed to continue paid editing, but must be aware of the CoI etc. Basically how it is at present.
My view on this is pretty basic. I don't care why someone writes free content for us, as long as it's compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N, and all the other associated content policies for inclusion in Wikipedia. Did you write the article because you thought it was interesting as a subject? Because you're a fan of the place/person/business? A patron? An employee? Because they paid you? Once you release and post the content to the encyclopedia, you have no control over it--it's live. Your paying sponsor, if you had one, paid you--not Wikipedia. They have no claim or control over the content we have here. We have a host of policies to deal with content, and editing by users. Does it really matter why they wrote the content, if it's quality? If not, we have the options in-process of WP:Speedy Deletion and WP:Articles for Deletion for content that doesn't qualify. That's all we need. More to the point, if someone does something crazy like pay a person to write a featured article about them, their company, or product, do we care? We get another Featured Article out of the deal.
Speaking as myself, I've written a featured article because I'm a fan and I've met them several times, they're tremendously nice people, and chat with one member periodically; wrote a good article for the same reasons, plus I've had a couple of drinks with the band; have one featured article bubbling in development because I'm a patron and their staff are some of the nicest guys I've ever encountered; two future FAs because I'm a fan of the place and a shopper there, and know at least two individuals in passing involved in various degrees with the administration of the overall facility; and have a nascent project to which I have actually given them money, and have multiple friends who are a part of the orginization. Any one of them could have paid me in theory $100 to write this content--they didn't--but if they had, so what? We'd have more good articles out of the deal.
I am wholly ambivalent about the motivation of why someone writes free content, so long as they do, we get it for free, it's policy-compliant, and they understand and accept (or don't, since their acceptance of policy is irrelevant in the end) they and their client has zero right nor claim of ownership of it from the moment it's posted. The "Why" doesn't matter; only the free content does, and there is nothing about the motivations of why someone writes that has anything to do with our "free culture". That "free culture" thing applies to us giving it away free to our readers, not "you must write it for free".
If someone wrote a stunning and neutral Featured Article on Topic X-Y-Z with 100+ sources, as their sole contribution, and then admitted immediately after it's promotion to FA status that they were paid $500 to do so by the subject so that they would get the massive "Google Juice" or exposure, would we block the author and depromote the article on principle, and run it through WP:AFD? Nonsense, any admin (any admin) doing so on grounds of "paid editing" would be grossly out of bounds. The FA cost us nothing but the time to review it. rootology ( C)( T) 19:19, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Talking about transparency, would you accept placing the below template at the top of the article? -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 07:32, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
This article has been edited by
user:Example in exchange of a fee. |
This article has been edited by one or more paid editors. |
I see no need for this template. Such templates are for pointing out problems with articles. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 09:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment
As Rootology says above, if the community judges it to be good content, then what's the problem? If the community doesn't judge it to be good content, it gets taken care of the way any other article does, and a clueless company has wasted their money. -- SarekOfVulcan ( talk) 19:38, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment:
I think that what you and User:Rootology are missing is that the constitution of this 'community' that judges content will change and therefore so will wikipedia. -- RegentsPark ( My narrowboat) 10:30, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Clearly, paid editing is slanted, biased, and does NOT in fact reflect closely the facts of the matter, or the opinions of the community. Even paid editing, though disclosed, serves the illicit purpose of mutilating the facts, and manipulating the reader(s). Propaganda, no matter how you pretty it up, is exactly that. Propaganda. Let the Fascists continue to have their way, and we will dance to George Bush's (Orwell) drummer ... just do it for the children, think of the children ...
I have always supported paid editing if you can get that work. Unfortunately, in the past the person/people most associated with paid editing are unpleasant and disliked; thus, the issue has been paired with them. It's time to review the idea outside of the past, and ask why our other policies and guidelines will not take care of perceived WP:COI issues. They would. Paid editing happens; only diligent review of material for NPOV, V and OR will circumvent problems with any of our material, paid or unpaid. -->David Shankbone 19:45, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Paid editing leads to paid nutters - you know who I mean - with an inherent POV to push and a monetary reason for pushing it. By all means, commonsense should be applied rather than a blanket ban, but third-party payment for editing of any subject for commercial or POV gains should be sanctionable if proven.
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Even if we did proscribe paid editing, how on earth would we ever prove that it had occurred? Since it is impossible to prove that money has changed hands, and it is highly unlikely that people will admit to paid editing, we need to judge content on the basis of what it says, rather than making guesses about the motivations of the people who contribute it. Tim Vickers ( talk) 19:54, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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As those with long memories may recall me arguing during the MyWikiBiz brouhaha, I think allowing paid editors to edit openly is a net positive. At least part of the material on every band article is written by fans; on every corporate article is written by employees; on every politician article is written by supporters… Yes, a paid editor isn't going to be neutral – but someone openly admitting that they're editing for profit is someone making their prejudice clear. I don't see how, for example, allowing paid editors to write about a corporation is any different in terms of the impact on Wikipedia than, for instance allowing a user who identifies as a gay-rights advocate on their userpage to edit sexuality-related articles, or an active church member to edit religious articles. Ten thousand active editors hopefully provides a bulwark against bias.
Besides, I would far rather have users able unambiguously to edit with their potential bias in the opening, than the current poor compromise, in which editors feel the need actively to hide their particular points of view. And everyone in the world has a point of view on any subject they're likely to care enough about to write an article. As long as we have people willing to keep an eye on their edits to make sure they don't step over the line into advertising, we should give an amnesty to all the existing "paid editor" blocks – yes Greg, even you – and start again with a clean slate. – iride scent 19:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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comment
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who has an ulterior motivation in contributing should note their interest on their userpage - be it editing for financial gain, a relationship with the subject, or other factor potentially effecting their bias. As regards bias, it is recognised that we all have one and it is by the amalgamating of differing bias' that we hope to achieve NPOV; being a paid editor should only be an extension of that consideration, among others also disposed toward a certain viewpoint.
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Comment
It's simple, really: paid editing automatically creates a COI. A known COI does not prevent editing but greatly reduces the requirement to assume good faith for any edits that have an appearance of non-neutrality.
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Comment. This is a huge leap in reasoning that requires some extraordinary support, in my opinion. It seems to me that this is a large motivating reason for "taking action" against paid editing, but simply stating this as a reason does not make it true. Ω ( talk) 08:14, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Paid editing is like editing without a username (an IP edit) - it should not be banned, but it is a red flag. Who is paying is more important than who is being paid - what are they expecting for their money? WAS 4.250 ( talk) 20:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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I largely agree with Rootology's points above, at least as far as the end product is concerned. If an article can go through the review processes and become featured, in the end it doesn't matter what the motivations were of the person who wrote it -- whether out of nationalist pride, personal fulfillment, a vendetta, or the prospect of income.
However, I think paid editing should only be allowed under certain conditions because of its impact on the process of developing an article (or otherwise influencing WP content):
Such disclosure would be mandatory but enforced via the honor system. It's pretty much impossible to prove that someone was paid for their edits unless they admit it themselves at some point -- so the aim of these rules is not to catch underhanded behavior, but to provide a standard way for good-faith editors to regulate their edits and to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish on behalf of their client and how they will respect WP policies in doing so. Clarity upfront should help avoid suspicions and misunderstandings down the road.
If someone is found to be editing for pay and they haven't followed these rules (and knew or should have known about them), they would be subject to trouting or other sanctions depending on the egregiousness of the behavior.
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Anyone who edits for pay has a conflict of interest and should follow WP:COI. That guideline calls on editors with a COI to declare their conflict and to only edit the article talk pages, not the article text. If they do so then there is no problem with being paid. Will Beback talk 20:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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If a paid editor is going to be editing, they should be following the PRSA code of ethics, located at [1], specifically the parts about avoiding deceptive practices and revealing the sponsors for causes and interests represented.
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I don't find paid editing inherently problematic. As Rootology mentions above, if paid editing results in content that meets our guidelines, we gain from it. I do think that explicitly allowing paid editing would open a Pandora's box of issues, though. The question of paid editing concerns not only the content produced but the methods used. For an obvious example, what happens when a paid editor participates in an AfD on his paid content?
We can't look just at content, but must also consider behaviour. If we allow paid editing, we implicitly allow the promotional advocacy that will come with it, that will use rules-lawyering and our own openness to attempt to push a particular version of "the Truth™" on us. While I'm confident that we know how to deal with spam, can we—and more importantly, would we—deal appropriately with behaviour that's promotional as well as content that's promotional? In the longer term, would the paid contributors burn out any of the volunteers? Would the advocacy result in arbitration cases and corrosive, endless disputes? Would it be detrimental to the health of the community?
The easy counter-argument that people can currently do paid editing without disclosure is not relevant: paid editing that can hide well enough that it isn't noticed isn't a huge problem, and people will always be able to edit under the radar as long as we have effective anonymity or pseudonymity. I see the problem not so much in paid editing itself but in the endorsement of paid editing (through any explicit allowance for paid editing). Wikipedia always needs to make a strong stand for its neutrality, and such an endorsement of advocacy is dangerous to that cause.
I don't mean to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt: if there are solid answers to the questions I ask, I'm willing to support paid editing. As a user experienced with Wikipedia, I might even stand to gain from it—I've already been offered the opportunity more than once (but politely declined each time). What I emphasize is not so much evils inherent in paid editing but dangers associated with them. {{ Nihiltres| talk| edits}} 21:40, 9 June 2009 (UTC), modified slightly at 22:13, 9 June 2009 (UTC), with a slight phrasing update at 04:32, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comments
We need a best practices policy/guideline, so that we can separate the good from the bad versus just tossing all paid editing into the DONTWANTIT bin. Some paid editing is good, such as when you can't distinguish between it and everything else here. Some paid editing isn't, such as when you can't distinguish between it and a press release. WP should make it clear what the rights/responsibilities are of both the editors and the clients that pay them.
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Paid editing is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Neither academia nor journalism are going to accept the argument that "everyone has biases ergo financially induced bias isn't an issue either". While it is true that paid editing can be very hard (if not impossible) to police, unless wikipedia does (and is seen to do) its utmost to be vigilant against such activities and bars them unambiguously, the project's credibility will suffer. Imperfect enforceability should not limit our ideals, else we may as well discard NPOV as an unachievable and naive goal too.
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Comments
I personally feel this is one of those things is best to take an "I can't see you" approach to. Some paid editors are decent editors trying to earn their way. If you're a long time Wikipedia contributor and get offered cash for doing what you enjoy, fair enough. Other paid editors aren't good editors, write poor articles and lower the 'pedia's standards. They should be treated like anyone else.
In my view, we should ignore whether people are paid or not. That's their business and not ours. The only thing that's important is whether they're adhering to our policy and creating good content. A featured article is a featured article, whether the author was paid or not. Similarly, vandalism is just that, whether the author was pushed to do so or not. Paid editors should be treated no differently to anyone else, and their status as such should plainly be ignored. Greg Tyler ( t • c) 21:53, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia welcomes positive contributions from anyone regardless of their personal motivations. However, experience has shown that when an editor's primary motivation is to promote a given organisation or cause, that editor is more likely to cause harm to the project. A glance through the arbitration logs confirms this. Widespread editing for financial gain can be expected to lead to problems such as single-purpose accounts, POV-pushing, edit-warring, and other policy violations, just as the motivations of religious fervor and nationalist pride have done so often in the past. Such ulterior motivations are difficult to square with our primary objective of building a neutral encyclopedia. The acceptance or legitimization of paid editing is likely to lead, in practice, to acceptance and legitimization of behavior that harms Wikipedia.
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Comment: The logical outcome of your argument is that we also ban nationalists and the religiously fervent. Like you say, they cause the same problems as paid editors would. -- Helenalex ( talk) 09:56, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
If you write an article on Wikipedia, your only concern should be to improve the encyclopedia. If you're getting any real world benefit from an article appearing a certain way (or appearing at all), then your interests are divided between WP and "something else". This is a COI any way you look at it.
Yes, paid editing happens more often than we are likely happy to admit. However, I would hazard a guess that Souckpuppetry also happens more often than we'd like. I don't think we should adjust our principles as a result though. We may not be able to stop either, but we can react when we discover them. Arakunem Talk 01:05, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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If a person edits a Wikipedia article, they are almost prime facie "interested" in the topic. (Some edits, like reversion of vandalism, may constitute exceptions to this generalization.) At the most general level, I believe an editor's interest derives from a simple desire to help others learn what one has learned oneself. But "what one has learned" is a grey area.
In mathematics, what an editor adds may be simple factual knowledge. But in other topic areas, an editor may have developed a more subjective view. When one gets into areas like same-sex marriage or assisted suicide or pedophilia, just to name a few random examples, it is simply impossible to write in a way that doesn't betray a certain point of view; every term one can use carries some cultural baggage, and some pre-packaged assumptions.
Such articles often become very good, when editors of differing points of view enter into good faith discussions, and find a way to incorporate both (or multiple) points of view into the article, permitting the reader to make his or her own judgments.
The idea of a "conflict of interest" is an attempt to draw a clear line where the reality is shades of grey. All Wikipedia editing is done by contributors who have an interest in the subject at hand. Drawing a clean line at paid editing is an ill-fated attempt to find a simple solution to a complex situation.
At the core, no policy or guideline can resolve such shades of grey; rather, the solution lies in the quality of our editors, and their ability to discuss topics from a framework outside their own personal views. This has been shown to work on some articles, but as a community, we still have some growing to do, and there are always more editors to help grow into this style of collaboration.
So, I oppose having any firm prohibition on paid editing. However, we must remain concerned about paid editing; I'm not advising we stick our heads in the sand.
I believe the solution lies in encouraging transparency, as WP:COI suggests. Editors who are closely connected to an article -- whether through payment, close personal associations, emotional attachment, or other ways -- should be encouraged to disclose this fact; and if they are regular contributors, they should find ways to do so (maybe repeatedly) so that other regular contributors are genuinely made aware of the conflict. Also, the principle that individuals, not organizations, have Wikipedia accounts is an important one to enforce.
There is one thing I strongly believe we should reconsider, which is this: currently, when making a new account, an editor is greeted with the following text:
I believe this should be rewritten. Certainly, some words of guidance are appropriate, as the choice of a username can have lasting implications. However, the way it is currently worded sets new editors off on a path that discourages individual accountability; it almost assumes that an editor will be making edits that he or she would not want attached to his/her name. This does not set the right tone for the kind of collegial environment that we should be striving to maintain.
- Pete ( talk) 01:45, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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'Comment I don't think anyone is claiming that the only unacceptable COIs are involved with paid editing. The issue is that paid editing the vast majority of the time will be too much of a COI. JoshuaZ ( talk) 00:17, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment. Anonymity is evil. Transparency is good. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 16:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
The problem with paid editing is that it opens the door to professional public relations firms being paid to craft and monitor Wikipedia articles for their clients. A firm or individual being paid $100,000 or more annually to ensure favorable treatment for their client in the media can significantly impact the content of a Wikipedia article. Now, such public relations operatives are forced to sneak around and run the risk of exposure and embarrassment to their clients. Endorsement of paid advocacy editing opens the door to massive influence on Wikipedia content by those interests who are able to afford professional public relations work of this nature.
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Comment
Any form of acceptance of 'paid editing' on wikipedia should be actively discouraged. The reasons for this are:
Unfortunately, money is the ultimate killer of any voluntary enterprise. There is nothing worse than the cheated feeling you get when you discover what other people are making for the same amount of work, there is nothing as attractive as getting paid for what you are good at, and there is nothing less reliable than the paid press releases put out by corporations, government bodies, individuals, just anybody.
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Disagree. Counter to point 1: 99% of people today edit Wikipedia for fun, this will not change. People don't care that some people are being professional gamers or players and are making $$$, they still play games/sports. NBA doesn't mean that fewer people are playing basketball. Counter to point 2: "Why would User:X slave away half the nights editing Arab-Norman culture for nothing?" Because he enjoys doing so, and can apparently make good living without editing Wikipedia for $. Not everyone is driven by $, so not everyone will switch to paid articles. And what about the possibility of non-profit organizations offering $ to have people write articles on, let's say, Arab-Norman culture? Counter to point 3: paid editing is just one of many POVs. Personally I worry more about religious fanatics and secret government agents then PR firms. Money just has a bad rep in some leftist fora :) -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:26, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
No.
-- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 05:11, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment (I have placed this comment also at Jimbo's Statement - where it has high visibility - but it was originally going to be placed here. I am doing so because I believe I am going to get a more considered response than someone who references a predilection to sanction without recourse anyone who may take a different view.) Right at the top of the masthead, it says that Wikipedia is the "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (my italics); the "free" bit is regarding the content to the reader, but the "anyone" makes no determination on what categories of potential contributor may or may not be included - my understanding is that 'anyone' means universal acceptance. Our licenses do not require that content is provided free, even though it is noted in the editing window that it may be used by third parties for financial reward. If Jimbo is correct then we need to clarify what we mean by "anyone", and amend our flagship statement of intent accordingly. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:35, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
I think paid editing would be a problem. First of all, if paid editing was in the project rather than free editing, there would be lots of committment issues within. Why? Some editor would be saying and thinking things like "why ain't I getting paid for helping", "if you don't pay me, I'll leave", "if I don't receive compensation for my edits, I will file a lawsuit", "oh, I get paid, this is the perfect job for me", "if you don't give me ${number} or more, I'll leave", and "I want money". Paid editing would destroy an editors abbility to be true and loyal to the project, and instead, they would only be loyal to themselves.
We don't get paid for our contributions to Wikipedia, and the lack of payment actually benefits us, because the editors as of now are true to the project, and are not like "give me money, give me money, give me money". If you're only here for money, you don't belong here, and should be kicked out to the farthest distance possible. Editors who are really here to help and not for money are the editors that belong here. They aren't here so they can gain an extra dollar, they're here so they can help make the encyclopedia better, which is why we are here.
To a certain extent, we editors do get something in return already. 1) The enjoyment of editing and 2) Our learning from other articles as a result of the writing of other editors.
It's not like the project tells you "if you help Wikipedia, we'll pay you this cash". It doesn't and shouldn't go that way. Instead, it goes "your help to this project would be appreciated by many readers, and your help and commitment will be accepted".
Why should I be paid for any edit I have made? Why should I be here for the cash and not the commitment to help? Why should anybody be paid? Why should Wikipedia pay you?
With that said, paid editing would destroy the integrity, purpose, commitment, hopefulness, and everything it possibly can, and will not help us in any way, period.
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A point that hasn't been brought up and is worth mentioning:
We should probably distinguish users who are paid to edit, but disclose the fact and edit honestly (in the wiki sense) from those who try to promote by the back door - spurious links, mentions in other articles, "not here to write an encyclopedia", etc.
A code for commercial or paid editors, or those with a personal interest in the topic, would be a good idea. We'd still get abuse from those who would mis-edit anyway, but my sense is that as of 2009, a lot of the wider PR and business world recognizes the PR disaster of "we edited our own Wikipedia article" and if given a policy to follow, they would do so. In brief, subject to consensus on a suitable policy, there is possibly no need to tar all such editors with the same brush.
A possible outline of such a policy is at User:FT2/Commercial and paid editing to give some idea of the requirements we might make for a genuine commercial editor.
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I wrote this explanation in reply to a comment here (+ some minor edits):
For those who hear "paid editing" and think "MyWikiBiz debacle" or "Microsoft stooges", I would like you to keep in mind other projects like LINGUIST List paying an intern to improve linguistics articles (see also User:Linguistlist). The Germany government has also paid to improve German Wikipedia articles in particular areas, see German_Wikipedia#Subsidies_from_the_German_government. Paid editing need not only be a force for evil!
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Comment
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Comment as an admin: disagree. It would be a discrimination against admins and crats. Of course, if an admin/crat abuses their tools / breaks policy "for profit", he should be desysoped immediately. But good faith should be assumed towards them just as towards other editors. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:36, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Conflict of interest editing is strongly discouraged because it is incompatible with the aim of producing a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia. In particular, an editor who receives a payment for their work is known to have a conflict of interest, and is strongly advised to comply with the relevant guideline by declaring their interest on their user page and on the talk page of any article they edit. In addition, such editors should restrict their comments in the articles for deletion process to brief statements of fact, for example by providing a reference regarding a disputed assertion. Only editors with no conflict of interest should debate whether an article is to be retained or deleted or merged.
Establishing whether a particular editor has a conflict of interest may not be possible, or even necessary. What counts is whether the editor displays a pattern of appearing to promote individuals or organizations. Such behavior is incompatible with the aim of producing a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia.
The community should deal with editors who may have a conflict of interest in a prompt fashion. If a pattern of promoting individuals or organizations is suspected, the editor should be restricted from creating any further articles or redirects other than those pre-approved by a mentor. Johnuniq ( talk) 08:39, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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A positive argument:
So far most of the pro-paid editing arguments have essentially been 'it won't be any worse than some of the stuff we get already' and 'we can't stop it so we should encourage people to be honest'. While these are both good arguments, I think paid editing could actually benefit Wikipedia.
The first point is that the number of articles affected would probably be fairly small. Corporations will pay for their articles, cities, countries etc will pay people to keep an eye on their pages and try and remove unduly negative material, agents will hire people to work on their clients' pages (musicians, actors etc) and political parties will be very interested. But generally speaking no one is going to pay money for someone to edit a page on a species of tree, or a dead composer, or a movie that came out in the 1960s or any one of thousands of other topics. Earlier this year I investigated setting up an editing business but decided against it when I realised that the number of pages which anyone had a financial interest in is actually pretty small. So Wikipedia will not be engulfed in a horde of PR people messing with every article. They will edit a limited number of articles, almost entirely in areas like politics and current events which tend to need close policing anyway. I think the strongest affected area would be politics, but since all parties would end up hiring editors, they would hopefully cancel each other out. For example if a Republican-paid editor put a puff-piece article up, a Democratic-paid editor would be in there to un-puff it. This is not really an argument in favour of editing, just that the impact would be far less than most people would think.
There seems to be an assumption that paid editors will inevitably behave badly. People are forgetting that paid editors would have a major financial interest in not being blocked, not having their every edit reverted, and not having the entire community distrust and dislike them. This would far outweigh the financial benefit of giving into a client who insists that their page have no negative material on it. In short, paid editors could not afford to piss people off, and would therefore be more conscientious than the average editor about abiding by policy, giving way to community consensus etc.
The majority of paid editing we know about is done by PR hacks who have no idea how Wikipedia works. Consequently their edits are awful. Enabling people who know what they're doing to offer their services will stop these people from trying to do something they don't know how to do - why would they when they can hire a professional who does? So rather than increasing the amount of PR fluff and so forth, this could actually reduce it as the clueless are replaced by the experienced.
Currently people who choose to edit for money are encouraged to be secretive about what they are doing. The current policy does not prevent paid editing, it simply drives it underground. Encouraging people to be honest about what they are up to means bias will be easier to spot and deal with. Plenty of biased editing looks fine at first glance; if we know that an editor has been paid and by who we can look a bit more closely and see whether we can trust them or not. Basically it would mean that paid editors would be scrutinised more than the average user, who may well be biased through personal prejudice, political or religous beliefs, nationality etc.
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When it comes to reliability, Wikipedia already has a poor reputation as it is, and this would only further harm its public image. Paid editing is something that Wikipedia should neither encourage nor condone.
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Some things are not policy simply because it's never been necessary to make it policy. It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. There are of course some possibly interesting alternatives, not particularly relevant here, but the idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now.
I think the opening statement on this page is a red herring. Would we block a good editor if we found out after the fact is a very different question. We have traditions of forgiveness and working with people to improve their behavior and ours whenever we can - things are never so simple. Of course it is possible to imagine a situation where someone can and should be forgiven... because that's very common.
That's not the same as saying that it would ever be ok, as a matter of policy. Just imagine the disaster for our reputation. Are we free and independent scribes doing our best to record all human knowledge? Or are we paid shills. I know what I choose.
Now, could it be perfectly fine for someone to set up an independent writing service for GFDL / CC BY / CC BY-SA content, to be posted somewhere else, and for completely independent wikipedians to find it useful in some way? Of course. But that's very different from setting up shop to sell one's services as an advocate editing articles? We have ways for advocates to participate in Wikipedia - the talk page serves perfectly well for this.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 15:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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“ | It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. | ” |
I hope the community takes away Jimbo's admin bit (as absurd as it would be) for abusing his admin tools, should he continue his practice of banning paid editors. Founder or not. It's pretty clear from his comments here that he cares more about image than the quality of the Wiki. -- Ned Scott 06:23, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
For the record, I explained to Jimbo four days ago on functionaries-en@wikimedia.org that I have also done "paid editing", and have not hidden this fact. Jimmy is right to say that we should not clump all "paid editing" together, but he is very wrong to write policy on a whim and threaten that he will block anyone who sells their services as an "editor", which equates to any form of "paid editing". FWIW, many of the instances of paid editing that I have seen are fundamentally wrong, however as illustrated at #Statement by pfctdayelise, there are many fantastic collaborations that involve money or in-kind. We should not be silly about this, and put our head in the sand. This is complex. We need to be open and honest about our editing, discuss the pros and cons, and it is not helpful to have threats of blocks hanging over our heads. If the community decides that I shouldn't create content at work, I will comply, and I expect others will as well. But I will not seek forgiveness from Jimbo, who has benefited from my efforts, or anyone for that matter. John Vandenberg ( chat) 11:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment The conflict of interest introduced by paid editors is greater than it is for other COIs, such as fans writing for bands, advocates writing for causes they believe in, etc. A fan whose peacock prose got cut or modified would probably be willing to concede the point eventually, but someone whose paycheck, perhaps even livelihood, depends on them getting something onto WP would not be so accommodating. The paid editor is not working for WP; they're working for Company X, so they have nothing to lose by trying to get their POV on here however they can. Also, pardon my French, but the idea of admins or crats being paid to sway policy here makes me fucking sick. Matt Deres ( talk) 23:10, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment Jimbo no longer has the power to make or break policy. It was by his unilateral decree that speedy deletion criterion T1 was created 3 years ago. It was later repealed by community consensus. He is respected for his vision, and as the face of Wikipedia, but as he himself has so often said, it is not he who builds or runs Wikipedia, nor is he any more capable of predicting the most effective policy to instate. Our policy must be written as our articles are, and as the laws of every democratic nation are: by the consent of the people. Dcoetzee 07:18, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment: The German Chapter Wikimedia in Deutschland e.V. is cooperating with the state and a private institute. The projects' theme is writing articles about Renewable resources. The chapter spent 17,663 Euro for salaried personnel concerning this project from the budget of 2008. It is job-creation measure financed from the general donations. -- Simplicius ( talk) 11:39, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Disagreee This would be a radical, and I fear unenforceable change to WP:COI. Personally I would be quite happy if it became normal in Hollywood and Bollywood to pay their publicists to release low resolution photos and artwork stills of actors and fictional characters to Wikipedia, providing someone had already created an article about them. However I would much prefer that this was done transparently and publicly. As for other paid editing I don't see that we have the tools to ban it and therefore would much prefer that we set rules such as at wp:COI rather than attempt prohibition without the means to enforce that prohibition. At present when I suspect paid editing is going on I'm quite happy to refer people to wp:COI. I'm not sure how one would handle suspicions of paid editing if we had a complete prohibition, but I suspect we would all tend to be a bit more cautious before accusing newbies of something blockable - hence my fear that this would be another example where prohibiting a human behaviour increases rather than reduces it. Ϣere SpielChequers 13:54, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment as some users have said above, I think we need a separate request for comment to determine, once and for all, whether Jimbo - who, I'm sure we all love and respect dearly - can set down legislation on his own. I'm not sure I have strong feelings either way: on the one hand I am rather anti-authoritarian and democratic. On the other, on a more human level, I realise I'd feel a bit pissed if a community I virtually created and nurtured took me out of the loop. In theory, if Jimbo DOES say he can legislate alone, then the RFC kinda fails no matter what anyone else says on the subject. I feel this might be something we have to work out, just so we know. -- bodnotbod ( talk) 19:19, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Personally, I feel that editing with a COI is a much bigger issue than rootology makes it out as. For starters, rootology claims that every paid editor is either a "good" editor or a "bad" editor, and is recognizeable as such on sight. This ignores subtle POV-pushing. For a current example, see [5] [which apparently was noticed by someone else too, see above], which alleges that outright lies have been introduced to ODF (I have not investigated both sides of the issue; however, if POV pushing similar to that described by this article was going on, I don't think we would notice based solely on the contributions). A COI is a very serious issue; we cannot compromise on this. A paid user may be "bad" but also very subtle. A sufficiently subtle user might be misinterpreted, even deliberately so, as helping the community (or trying to) when in fact he is hurting it. We need a solid policy against this type of thing. I propose considering all paid accounts to be role accounts, since their motivations are extremely similar, and in fact there may not be much difference between them. It seems to me that:
-- Thin boy 00 @903, i.e. 20:40, 10 June 2009 (UTC) Additions in square brackets.
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I enjoy Wikipedia, and I had never thought about being paid until a few weeks ago when I saw a request for a freelance writer on an email list and offered some of the Wikipedia articles I had been mostly responsible for as samples. The businessperson replied that she had tried to write an article about a clearly unique product that she sells, but that the article had been speedy deleted. I did a quick search and found several reliable and verifiable sources that would have allowed me to create a DYK-eligible article in under a half hour. I thought of offering to write such an article in exchange for my services, but declined to even make the offer as it would irrevocably tarnish my amateur standing, and I always wanted to be able to compete internationally if they ever made Wikipedia an Olympic sport.
When I saw this RfC, I assumed that I would be against paid editing. Until I saw Jimbo's remarks. While I appreciate the lofty goals that have been set, so many of them end up being imposed at the expense of the most committed editors. Despite all of the bots, and all of the folks on Huggle, Twinkle and other tools, I am one of many editors who spends hours each day trying to keep out the crap, poop and other shit from vandals, who are invited in with no barrier to entry in the name of having an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit". While I put in my time as an amateur, nothing prevents Jimbo Wales from trading off all of the effort put in by unpaid labor ($3 billion worth, per his article) to receive fees and expenses for his speaking engagements around the globe in which he talks about how wonderful all the volunteers at Wikipedia are. While paid editors may create problems that tarnish our reputation, we seem to do a great job of embarrassing ourselves, up to the ArbCom level, without a penny trading hands.
I couldn't help but be reminded of all the talented amateur athletes at notable American colleges and universities who play football or basketball, working their asses off in training, practices and on the field/court. Their schools bring in tens of millions of dollars each year, their coaches are paid millions and the athletes are paid zero (don't worry, I haven't forgotten about scholarships). If any player received a dollar for their hard labor, their school is obligated to toss them off the team. The NCAA seems to spend inordinate amounts of money and effort tracking down those disgraceful violators who seek a few dollars to cover their bills and ensure that the financial purity of the sport is maintained. And we volunteers at Wikipedia don't even get the scholarships that are purported to be the tradeoff. Remember that brainiacs get colleg scholarships without forced labor involved.
Let's pick one or the other. If we can't make money off Wikipedia, let's make sure that no one does. If it is okay for some to trade off their Wikipedia involvement, let's set up a mechanism under which some of the editors who contribute massive amounts of time and effort can have the opportunity to earn a few bucks for their labors.
My suggestion would be to have an equivalent of a "paid articles for creation". A company, organization or individual would submit a request for a new article, detailing why it's notable and providing whatever material they have on their own. As long as there is a whiff of basic notability, existing editors would then bid for the right to create the article. The winning bidder would create the article, which would have to pass muster of both the entity that wanted the article and some board that would verify that the article meets Wikipedia notability and POV standards. Everything is on the up-and-up, there is no direct connection between bidder and author and we can have a win-win situation; editors can earn some money and someone can get an article created that no one qualified to create the article would have an interest in creating.
At last we peons would be able to earn a small fraction of what Jimbo earns from Wikipedia and I would be able to tell my wife that the time I spend on Wikipedia is bringing in some income.
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If I had wanted to worry who could benefit from my work or whether I'd get paid, I wouldn't have licensed it GFDL or contribute to an encyclopedia that mandatorily does so. When I edit, I do so aware that I'm volunteering free content that can be used by anyone in the world. When I am told that someone might take the content I added, and re-use it in a way that somehow makes them money, that's fine - it's free for commercial use too. I expect it, and I don't begrudge it. My focus is on the content anyone can use, not green-eyed envy at who might be benefiting from it "out there" whether Jimbo, a student, some web entrepreneur, whatever.
Frankly, if Jimbo has moved on in his other projects and found that his standing due to Wikipedia enables him to make an honest income elsewhere... or Veropedia can reuse and polish our better articles and wants to use them with advertizing for profit... or some unknown finds a whole new way to profit from them... frankly I care more whether the next edit I write will be an improvement to free knowledge. That is what the "free" in "free knowledge" is about. FT2 ( Talk | email) 01:04, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Paying to have articles written (presumably favorable ones) is antithetical to the original premise of Wikipedia. Perhaps somewhere a "paypedia" will eventually be created, but this is not the project to try the experiment on. We already have significant problems with people pushing points of view because of personal beliefs, allowing overt payments for articles would be an order of magnitude more of a problem, especially where competing interests might pay for conflicting articles. Collect ( talk) 23:06, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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Some of the above comments above say that editing for pay is fine as long as NPOV, V etc are followed. Well, in the case of a businessman who hires a person to look after/write a Wikipedia article for them with a narrow objective, the chances of NPOV are pretty negligible.
Would a businessman pay for an article if it was not promotional? If it contained information about the lawsuits against the businessman in question?
I googled up the subject of a hired pay-article (a businessman) written by User:Zithan (as discussed on Jimbo's talk page) and I found that he was the subject of law suits for a variety of frauds, racism and so forth. He was also a business partner with a person who was sanctioned by a watchdog for improper business practices/scams and criticised by a leading finance pundit and author in a mainstream newspaper for being dodgy. I can email the links to people because the article's subject does have a tendency to sue people who criticise his business practices.
Needless to say, this was not in the pay-article, and I have no doubt the client/subject would not have paid up if it was. Which is why believing that paid editing on specific orders of people who want an article about themselves can be NPOV is pretty naive. After all, which businessman has not made a mistake, not to mention those who willfully engage in dubious business practices and want misleadingly glowing profiles of themselves on Wikipedia? YellowMonkey ( cricket calendar poll!) 02:14, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comments
The disadvantages far exceed the advantages.
Once it's endorsed, it's to officially open the door for interest groups and tell them they're welcome. It will slowly and gradually have as result to filtrate Wikipedia when the non-paid editors will be driven out and be replaced by the paid ones.
MyWikiBiz is MyWikiBiz, everyone is free to build his own paid Wiki. If it's working elsewhere and good articles are built elsewhere, the material can be brought here, no need for any form of endorsement. It can't be prevented since it's probable that many are already paid to edit, but at least the naive editor who is not paid is encouraged into believing that others like him who contribute are doing it solely in the spirit of building an encyclopedia. It's so demoralising for the unpaid editor to know that another is being paid for the same amount of energy he puts on the project without any sort of monetary gain. It's inevitable that this same editor will either leave the project or turn to paid editing, thus leaving the subjects dear to him and migrating where there is some monetary advantage in editing.
The German government had good intentions but the government should have opened its own Wiki. If that Wiki could have anything relevant it could have been brought here.
Wikipedia has already many fatal problems, the last thing we need is an endorsement to a motto which says: The encyclopedia is where the money is. - Fedayee ( talk) 17:03, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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1. Organizations that share our educational mission: If people are scared about "paid editors," remember that a lot of them will be employees at "public interest" organizations (nonprofits/governments/schools), which earn their budgets by convincing donors/taxpayers/tuitioners that they are achieving their missions of "educating the public on [topic X-Y-Z]." Currently, these organizations (and Wikipedia) waste huge amounts of time in accomplishing this common mission. First, the organizations hire employees to publish this info at their websites (e.g. www.epic.org, www.commerce.gov, etc). Then a Wikipedian has to find these resources in a Google search, and mention it among an article's "external links". Then the information slowly creeps into the article by osmosis. If we could convince these organizations to perform their educational mission directly on Wikipedia, then they (and we) can better accomplish that mission. (To make my point more concrete: I happen to be a government employee who sneaks in occasional edits (on my areas of expertise) while at work. Imagine how much better Wikipedia would be if my boss ENCOURAGED this as part of our bureau's mission!)
2. The Credit Motive: If the nonprofit chooses to surrender this web traffic to Wikipedia, it will want to make it up somehow. These paid editors aren't going to want to HIDE their affiliations; they will want to DECLARE it. If Wikipedia is to reap this huge benefit, we should accommodate the credit-motive, not quarantine it. For example, there should be a space on the talk-pages to accommodate these shout-outs: "This article on the history of anti-semitism in Europe was extensively edited by the Anti-Defamation League." "This article on housing discrimination has been adopted by the New Jersey Attorney General." This may require a structural change -- e.g. special accounts for individuals who are performing their edits as part of their employment. Agradman ( talk) 18:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Using Agradman's example, the logical conclusion of paid editing and the incumbent full disclosure will be statements on the article and/or talk pages such as:
I acknowledge that this is a bit over the top, but not by much when you start to think about it. Priyanath talk 21:24, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Openly endorsing paid creation and editing of Wikipedia content would make Wikipedia look foolish, because it would be foolish. It is already policy that Wikipedia is
not a soapbox for advertising or self-promotion. Therefore, is it not an outlet for paid promotional writing. Endorsing paid the editing of Wikipedia by paid advocates would be authorizing
COI on steroids and would undermine the
pillar of
neutrality.
Finell
(Talk) 21:14, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia:REQUEST already exists.
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Addition of paid-for new content (new articles, or expansions of existing articles) where that content is wholly compliant with all "content" policies (WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, WP:N, etc.) is not a bad thing, in particular when that is disclosed as what it is, and the user(s) who add that content adhere at all times to community-endorsed policies relevant to the addition of content to Wikipedia.
Paid-for advocacy--either to retain content at venues such as WP:AFD, modify content in any way contrary to content policies (WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, WP:N, etc.); or to "purchase" the aid of Editors, Administrators, or any other higher-level Wikipedia users to do the same is completely wrong, against policy, and any users who participate in such actions should be banned.
In short, "adding" new paid policy-compliant content is not bad, but paid advocacy of any sort beyond that is very bad.
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Comment
I’d like to draw your attention to this version of the Ashlar-Vellum article (a CAD program). Note the Wikipedia is not your Website thread on its talk page, where an editor wrote I tagged this article for a number of violations, but mainly for consisting of advertising and press-release material. As far as I can tell, due to my knowledge of what was going on with Ashlar at the time, the editor User:Yu.yutik, was “close” with the Ashlar company and this resulted in the “brochure” nature of the article and the need for a bunch of work by the rest of the community to make the article objective.
The statement by Rootology I don't care why someone writes free content for us, as long as it's compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N sounds pragmatic from a point of view of the objective, but I don’t think it is a realistic measure of what will really happen. There is a reason why most major democracies don’t have the judge in a trial act also as the prosecutor. If the “judge” (the Wikipedian responsible for ensuring an article is fair, neutral, and balanced) is the same person as the “prosecutor” (someone being paid by someone who hopes to advance an agenda for financial gain), bias will be an inherent and chronic problem.
I would say that if Wikipedia were to ever allow (or experiment with allowing) content to be posted that was written by editors paid to write the content, that they be required to A) register, and B) have a “(PAID AUTHOR)” suffix at the end of their user name, such as Greg L (PAID AUTHOR) (which I am not, by the way). This way, the community can more easily audit the work product of these authors and have two eyes open as to what we are getting into. Signed: Greg L ( talk) 00:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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WP:OtherMzoli'sExist, or why it doesn't matter where donated content ultimately comes from.
Continuing with what Greg L. writes (and noting that I have no horse in this race and am not likely to be paid by anybody to write anything for Wikipedia) I think it’s worth emphasizing that the legal system DOES work on the basis of material contributed largely by paid advocates. The reason it can DO this is, that the judges and juries aren’t bribed. With WP, it hardly matters where the raw content comes from, so long as other editors are free to pound it into some kind of “fair and reasonable” shape, later. To that view, it’s far less damaging for WP to have some company pay somebody to contribute raw material (paid writing), than it is for WP to allow some company to pay somebody to WP:OWN an article and continue to push a POV after the sourced material and images have been initially put in (paid editing and promo).For an example of the last, which we don’t want, see the great Scientology fiasco. The problem there was, we didn’t have any “statement of COI” by the Scientology advocates, or in the articles. YET, for an example of an industry where such statements work reasonably well, see the US pharmaceutical industry, which contributes more money for basic biomedical research than the US government does. How do the journals keep up with the flood of COI writing, of which there is a great deal? By making sure there is no COI final-editing, and that all writers self-identify that they’re being paid pharma money. In the end, the truth comes out in later publishing, and bad and non-working drugs are identified anyway.
So why do medical journals put up with all of this? Because of the shear amount of content that isn’t available any other way. A great many corporations and foundations have a LOT of inside-information, and also inside-images (copyrighted images are even more important), which they would never be interested in putting on Commons if they thought that their contributions would be immediately deleted, the moment somebody found out it was contributed by somebody with a COI. But so long as information isn’t BLP info (a whole area I personally think WP should stay away from, due to the potential COI problems due to money, sex, power, you name it), then I think all this can be dealt with.
A last example of this is useful, as one which was as bad as if it HAD been a paid-advertisement article: Once upon a time, some high Wikipedian had dinner at Mzoli's Meat in Capetown, South Africa, and liked it, and created a stub on the butcher/restaurant, sort of in the style of Andrew Zimmern or Anthony Bourdain. It went immediately for speedy-delete under WP:NOTTRAVEL, but survived mainly because of who had started the stub. Editors scrambled to find ways it should be notable. After a while, the place was starting to sound like the diamond of upper-class black South African networking. Finally, it settled down to being a pretty good article, of the sort you might want to read if you were in the area looking for a place to eat, and wanted to ignore NOTTRAVEL (you may have noticed that most of the things in WP:NOT actually are about stuff that WP:IS). So in the end, it didn’t matter. Even though the Mzoli’s probably should have been deleted under WP's own policies, so long as WP was forced to keep it by editors who thought they owed it to the project to FIND reasons to keep it, it came out okay ANYWAY, ala WP:IAR. And the same will happen to articles written and illustrated by corporations and businesses too, so long as (at some point) their influence ends, and their initial input is declared, and labeled. As well as the copyrighted images they provide. That’s the way it happens in the “real world,” from journalism to law to politics to medicine to science. Initial material is provided only by the biased, and is fixed up later. Wikipedia is kidding itself if it thinks it’s going to get much better than that. S B H arris 05:01, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What a lot of statements! A suggestion for how to frame future discussion:
Should we:
In the first two cases, should we:
Fwiw, I think we should do 1) and 1). Possibly we could even have a process for removing the template when an article has been thoroughly reviewed and "de-biased". There *is* a difference between a big article written from scratch by a paid editor, and one written by a volunteer, and I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that.
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Comment: I don't agree that we should do #1, so I cannot endorse your statement, but I do agree with how we should frame future discussion. Personally, I think that we should do #4. hmwith τ 17:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Why the song and dance?
Let's look at the tangled web:
Possible improvements: Focus on the product. Consider establishing a COI/POV task force of both admins and non-admins, including technical experts and BAG, answerable to ArbCom, that offers specialised training to volunteers, identifies problem areas and articles, and monitors possibilities for improving the automated identification of COI/bias. It should be a badge of honour to be a foot soldier for such a task force.
[Disclaimer: I don't and won't edit on WP for money—it couldn't be afforded, anyway. Nor do I enjoy the luxury of being able to edit during paid office hours.] Tony (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:COI#Financial Paid editing is a straight case of the conflict of interests that should be dealt according to WP:COI (that IMHO should be a policy and have more teeth in this). Thus, at the very least paid editing should be acknowledged as a matter of course.
Looking from the goals of the project paid editing might help to create new content that is a good thing but also might encourage bias and POV disputes and so might be quite dangerous. In my opinion we should encourage sponsoring of creation of the new content (like our Wikipedia:REWARD does e.g. an Australian entomological society sponsors creation articles on Australian insects) and discourage or even outright ban sponsoring POV pushing (e.g. an elected official or a commercial entity sponsoring articles promoting itself). One of the bad cases of POV pushing sponsoring might be a government agency hiring PR professionals to glorify (or whitewash) their policies on wiki (e.g. Russian of Georgian government paying PR professionals to influence 2008 South Ossetia war article). I have not yet seeing a convincing case of such meddling but the accusations are quite common and the matter can be quite damaging if it happan in reality).
Another case could be bribes for administrative actions. I am not sure if it ever happen but I was once offered something that looked like one (and obviously refused). I think paid administrative (bureaucratic, oversight, checkuser, arbitrator, etc.) actions should lead to immediate removal of the privileged bits.
This is basically my position: all paid editing should be acknowledged. Sponsoring of "good editing" should be encouraged while "bad paid editing" should be a blockable affair. Administrative bribes (if proven) should lead to desysopping.
Rootology is a terrible idea. Civilizededucation ( talk) 07:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand your statement. Do you mean his idea is bad, or that "Rootology" (what ever that discipline is supposed to be about) is a bad idea? (I assume you don't mean that he, himself, is a "terrible idea" ;-) -- llywrch ( talk) 16:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Paid editing represents a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest may result in biased editing even when the contributor in question intends to maintain a neutral point of view. For this reason, editors who have previously (i.e. prior to the opening of this RfC) accepted money for their efforts have an ethical responsibility to disclose their financial gain. Disclosing these past conflicts of interest will allow other editors to evaluate whether any neutrality problems have arisen. In the event that an editor does not move to divulge these interests and is shown to have taken money in return for publication of Wikipedia articles or advocacy in the article space, it should be taken as evidence that that person is not editing with the intention of improving the encyclopedia. Such an editor is disruptive and should be subject to community sanctions.
It will not be possible to rid Wikipedia of all paid editing. However, all future paid editing in the article space should be prohibited by policy. The time required of unpaid editors to evaluate and/or extirpate NPOV violations from articles written by paid editors is time taken away from the development of more compliant portions of the encyclopedia. Any individual or for-profit organization shown to have commissioned an article should be considered a banned user, and a user who is shown to have accepted funds from such a source should be subject to the terms of the ban, as per Wikipedia:Banning policy#Editing on behalf of banned users. Dekimasu よ! 16:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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I can't endorse due to the existance of some paid editors doing good neutral work, see statement by pfctdaye. This blanket ban would left them out of wikipedia. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 01:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
This debate was precipitated by someone spotting some paid editing actually going on so I've gone through the account mentioned
[6] and matched the adverts ("clients") up with the articles created by
User:Zithan. I recommend that people read the full text of each paid editing advert (the full version in the link at
Ha!/paid editing adverts) and then assess the related article that was created, as it will provide an insight into paid editing that can then inform the debate
Note: I didn't realise you can't read the full text of the adverts unless you sign up for a (free) Elance account. I've put that full text at Ha!/paid editing adverts
I'm 100% sure on these correlations and have much more detailed "proof" and reasoning if there's any doubt (it's not hard to work out by just reading the adverts/jobs). Sometimes blank or unrelated articles were initially created in a sandbox months earlier and later moved to the article name, so some article creation dates may seem out of sync with the advert bidding dates, but they match when those moves are taken into account. There are three adverts
[19]
[20] I couldn't match up - but they will turn out to
Dave Levine/
Sextoy or the range of
Marketing Performance Measurement and Management articles or
Qualifying Industrial Zone as those are the only other articles created by this user (the account was used almost exclusively for these paid articles)
It's clear to me that these articles were created for the benefit of the companies and individuals concerned and not for the benefit of the Wikipedia project. On close scrutiny it's obvious that skilful and experienced editing and knowledge about how to stay on the right side of policy has been used to create the impression of respectability, reliable sourcing, some mutual reinforcement and notability.
I propose that any paid editing must be openly declared in the same way as if it was the subject themselves that was creating or editing the article, but also with an open declaration by the editor that they are being paid for it. Ha! ( talk) 16:43, 12 June 2009 (UTC) To be clearer, this would only be in the event that paid editing is accepted - which is something that I believe would be very damaging to the project on a practical as well as an ethical level. Ha! ( talk) 14:08, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment
I've added some more from another Elance account to the list above and added the details to
User:Ha!/paid editing adverts.
Ha! (
talk) 01:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
This is being oversimplified to no end. Paid editing has a lot of repercussions beyond anything any supporters of it have considered so far. Just to name one which was still not brought up is the filtering of administrators. If someone is paid for the job, he will obviously have more time to edit than the average editor because he will not edit only in his free time but also during working hours. Wikipedia is built in a way that edit counts is the number one qualifier to become an administrator. Those being paid will be overrepresented in the higher positions because they have more time to contribute than others. So in a way, with the money, you are not only buying articles but also the higher positions. It's just ethically wrong to give any position to any editor when there is any monetary gain in his contribution which is against the spirit of voluntary work.
Another major problem, lets suppose you have two editors with 40,000 edits (both in a period of two years) presenting themselves for adminship. The first one is paid and the second is not. It can be assumed that in a big sample where a group is in one category and another in the other, in average those being paid have a higher background than the unpaid one who made 40,000 edits. Now comparing the higher background editors among them, on average those who are paid will have on average more edits. Those editors have both the background and the number of edits, opening them the door to any of the higher positions.
The result of this is obvious, those on the higher position will not be motivated mostly because of their interest for the project itself. Some people brought up that editors who are paid or not do it for reasons. Well, let it present it this way, will you grant adminship to a nationalist POV pusher? His contribution is at risk of being motivated by other things than the encyclopedic nature of the project. I'd rather give that position to honest contributors when all, I mean, all of his edits are made to further the project.
And here I am presenting one problem among many others, which is not directly linked to content itself. Because not only content will suffer, when the volunteers will stand no chance against the paid editors.
Like I previously said and also along the lines of what Jimbo has proposed, paid editing can be done elsewhere, it should be to the non-paid volunteers to know what can be retrieved to be brought on Wikipedia.
It also boggles me that some supporters will reply by saying that Jimbo himself has a monetary advantage with the project itself. But how does his gain endanger the integrity of the project like paid editing would? - Fedayee ( talk) 17:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment Regarding the edit count equaling adminship qualification - very few articles will be covered by just one patron, and where there is a disproportionate effort in one area (unless it is gnomish activity) most reviewers at RfA will usually determine a lack of overall input and !vote against. As for Jimbo, his opinions are important but the community has evolved passed the requirement for automatic felicity to his word. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:59, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I only believe fifty percent of the technical information on Wikipedia and on the internet. Any technical article that is not peer reviewed by 20 to 30 competent technical reviewers is of questionable value. Although I have coordinated the review of approximately 150 technical papers, I am still concerned that I might have allowed the publication of an article that was pure science fiction. Fortunately, other researchers will repeat experiments when they question the results of another scientist. I doubt that Wikipedia has adequate staff to assure the accuracy of the technical content on its website.
One of my friends is paid to edit the technical content of a publication. The quality of the technical portion of the publication has dramatically improved while he has been the editor.
I realize that I and other members of the academic community volunteer our time as editors. However, I believe that more professors would volunteer to serve as editors if they were paid.
It is true, as some note, that paid editing already happens and will continue to happen whether we sanction the practice or not. I take this as an excellent reason to tighten our standards to stop and frustrate it wherever we can. Using it as a rationale to authorize it is to my mind an abject abdication of our core principles, those being NPOV, unbiased writing, keeping us from being a soapbox for advocacy and keeping us a volunteer effort which fosters all those policies. Paid editing and NPOV and related policies are implacable enemies. This would be giving the foxes the keys to the henhouse rather than acknowledging that foxes are out there prowling, but doing our damnest to keep the doors shuttered. Someone compared this earlier to decriminalizing drugs (which I am for); it is not. It is akin to a practice we all recognize as a society as inherently criminal or immoral, the decriminalization of which might have some minor, surface-only silver lining, completely out of proportion to its negatives, but we do it anyway because "hey, we can't stop it entirely and it will go on whether we make it a crime or not, so let's just write into the law that it's okay, and puts some processes in place to regulate [that inherently bad] conduct".
A person writing for a company is 100% beholden to them and if they are experts at using Wikipedia, they will win most of the time. This is especially true when our resources are stretched thin and boy would they be in short order. Someone comes to me and pays me to write an article, don't you think it would be easy for me to game the system, twist and pervert a few policies here and there, " including that criticism would be undue weight", and "no, the the burden is one you" and "you're not assuming good faith! and I was just being bold!, and making false sockpuppetry reports and well, we all know how many WP:BEANS ways there are to make the whole process a nightmare for admins and experienced good faith editors who are trying to deal with a canny POV warrior who knows our policies to some extent. Just wait until they are paid to be experts—not just at writing but at gaming Wikipedia; they will have manuals describing strategies to use, sockpuppets hidden by in-house IT professionals, and an army of coordinated meatpuppets in different geographic locations to draw on, and they will edit Wikipedia all day long motivated by money. It is a nightmare scenario.
"But we already have all manner of COIs; with disclosure we will be able to regulate them." No you will be converted, subsumed or made irrelevant over time. Yes, we have COIs (and that guideline would be a policy with fangs under my ideal version of Wikipedia) but there is a scale to them; a manner in which they manifest that keeps them under some wraps; by discouraging them; looking down upon them; having G11, and WP:SPAM and our NPOV policy as a bulwark and others, we keep them in some check. A secondary effect I project in allowing paid editing will be to increase our regular COIs by many orders of magnitude. Things have to be scalable to be dealt with, and we will reach a threshold beyond which our best efforts will be bailing water from a sinking ship with thimbles.
Allowing paid editing would allow companies, even with "disclosure", to mount an effort that we could never keep in check. The resources they would bring to the table would tie us in knots. And the long picture is that even if you stay—aren't converted by the very insidious appeal of making an avocation your vocation and aren't driven away by the idea that you're donating your time while others are being paid—you're just early members of an indefinite project. The long term prospects for this are 1, 2, 3 more? millions of articles all written by companies like "Wikipedia Writers Associates, Inc." "The company with the know how to make your Wikipedia article stick!" ( ♯ insert jingle ♯ )." They would have a twenty page form where they asked what the company wanted WWA to stump for in the article, what should be minimized or mentioned in a way that takes the sting out of, and so on, and they would advertise perfect confidentiality as to what you asked them to do and that they would strictly keep their client list private within the bounds of the law.
One premise used in support of this is that good content is good content (an FA or GA is an FA or GA). An underlying assumption in stating this is that there is a workable and easy way to assess whether an article meets both our policies and our stated assessment criteria for fine articles. There is not. All of our good content, every single well-developed article on Wikipedia—every single one—was not built from collaboration by thousands of different people adding content here and there. And certainly, concerted efforts at promotion are not stopped and "decontaminated" by drive by editing. We are a collaboration but it's not any pure form that that word standing alone may imply to some people. Drive by editors fix mistakes, add facts, change a word here or there, etc., but reliable, well organized, unbiased, sourced articles are in all cases written by a core group, sometimes just one person, sometimes a few, who organize, focus, do research and cite facts, while writing and shaping the main content. The meaning of this is that that core group vastly controls the final product. "Ah", you say, "but we have assessment processes that will take care of any problems such as promotional tone, POV problems, failure to include anti-material"—all the things that our neutrality policy covers. They will make sure the article is comprehensive as to material in general and that there is proper weight given to negative and positive material... Nope. That is an oversimplification that crumbles upon closer examination.
It is well nigh impossible to take a fully written article that is grossly promotional, subtly promotional, or both, and fully remediate it; not just by fixing its tone, but in all manner of subtle ways that affect the end article: shades-of-meaning word choices, careful omissions, emphasis on one fact and de-emphasis on another, organization that places one thing before another for a purpose, choice of reliable sources used, even things like which products to mention in a list of examples that a company manufactures (and only they know which ones they want to promote now), and on and on. People at WP:PR and WP:FAC and those who do review in less formalized ways are not omniscient, which is what it would take. They question whether a source is reliable and they sometimes say "why isn't X included", and much more, but they aren't normally experts on the subject, and they are not rewriting from the base up and they haven't spent 100 hours (or maybe a career) studying the subject. Without being that kind of an expert, and doing a complete rewrite, they can never remediate all the nuanced sneaky and subtle promotion. We would be their shills and they would be us before long. No, they'll catch many surface defects and some of the more subtle problems, but the article will never resemble that never written article that truly disinterested third parties would have composed.
X giant corporation's professionally hired and written article about itself by Wikipedia writing experts, and vetted at great labor by our best disinterested personnel, will still be chock full of promotion that you won't be able to find because it will be built into the base structure and manifest itself in ways that are so hard to recognize, they're more about the path not taken. We will never get to compare that article to what it would have been, but only if you saw that, could you recognize the difference.
And that's best case scenario for articles that do go through some sort of rigorous assessment against our policies. Most articles never get that type of treatment. Enforcing our policies after the fact is many times as difficult and less efficient as having them instilled by belief so they are *truly* followed by those writing content, ab initio. I say truly because I do not mean by this, people who are intimately familiar with all we expect and knowing that, try to meet the appearance of compliance. But there won't be anyone minding the store to even try to do this. We will sleep with the enemy and we will be transformed, not just tomorrow but over the long haul. The singular effect of having others paid to do what you do for free will drive away not just some of our present editors, but a much larger number of future editors. They will never become "hooked for free" because there will be no philosophical altruistic model to make them want to come. Someone mentioned a soup kitchen analogy earlier which I think was spot on. Your future brethren will not resemble you.
You ever look in the newspaper at movie ads? Normally every single ad has one or more quotes from people extolling the movie's virtues. Actually good movies have excerpts from The New York Times and Rolling Stone because they actually got a real review. Bottom of the barrel crap also has "best movie ever" pullquoted, but when you examine the source, it's always some person or organization you've never heard of. Often those are quotes from publications whose sole business is to write glowing reviews of offal so they can be quoted in movie ads where no industry person with integrity would.
Similarly, if we do this, in ten years there will be publications built on the business model of supplying for hire seemingly reliable sources so that Wikipedia articles can supply some peacock factoid, or rebuttal of criticism, or maybe even to be used to insert a sourced statement geared towards raising the company's stock price minutely during a particular time frame so that the accountants at some transnational have the ability to shave some pennies off a number used to calculate quarterly tax payments. It will all be okay, because even if discovered, it will only be seen as minor "wiki-spin" by some lower echelon functionary who would receive the blame, if any was needed. At that point it wouldn't be seen as an embarrassing thing to do as it is now and it would be very unlikely that anyone would catch subtle manipulation because Wikipedia would have already officially allow companies to edit their own articles and to hire people to do so. It would just be the status quo and we would probably be nicknamed McPedia already by that future time so who would care? Let us reject this with a resounding no, no, a thousand times no!
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Biases fall on a continuum. On one extreme end would be "0 bias motivation": the person who likes to learn by writing and writes on a random topic just to learn about it (I've done that). Somewhere near to that end would be the person who writes because they are intellectually fascinated by a topic, then "involved as a hobby or career"; I won't belabor this by listing every interstitial point I can think up, but on the opposite end of our fictitious scale would be those writing to influence a fanatically held religious or other worldview position and, at the very apex, would be those who are paid by a third party, hired to promote that person or entity's image. Why? Because they have a 100% likelihood of being biased, having contracted to write a panegyric, and are accountable to that third party with money at stake.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk) 22:33, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
The main argument in favour of paid editing made above is that it doesn't really matter as other editors would correct any policy violations. From what I've seen, this isn't correct. It wouldn't be difficult for a medium-sized organisation or semi-famous person to put together an article on them which meets the notability standards. Once the initial checking of the new article is done its unlikely that anyone would watchlist the article and it would then be easy to add over-statements while ensuring that nothing negative is allowed to remain. This article would then be one of the first things to appear on Google searches on the topic (making it a useful, and cheap, form of advertising) and it's very unlikely that anyone would care enough to ensure that the article was factual and neutral and/or be prepared to fight the paid editor over content on an obscure topic. Nick-D ( talk) 00:28, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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The argument that paid editing has a potential to generate good articles for the project has some validity. I can see philanthropic groups who want to support good editors to encourage their work for creating a free encyclopedia available to anyone with an internet connection. But I see a whole bunch of problems coming up also if paid editing is allowed for anyone and everyone. as pointed out above many individuals , companies & groups will likely pay editors of their choice money to create and subsequently maintain articles favorable towards them. Reputation of Wikipedia as a reliable source of info will likely suffer with this. What other encyclopedia lets you pay to write a paid article about yourself, your client your company or your organization even if it is an excellent article ?? Also if I was Bill Gates I could hire a zillion editors across the globe to make sure no mention of Anti trust allegations against Microsoft ever surfaces in the articles. any volunteer editors will soon stop touching the article once they realize that any mention of negative info will soon be purged. worse a competing company would hire another zillion editors to push their point of view. It will soon be WW3. I can see a whole industry developing and coming up with innovative ways to defeat wiki policies to ensure favorable articles for their clients for the right fee. Wikireader41 ( talk) 05:41, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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Two thought experiments:
Postscript — I should make clear that these hypothetical situations are meant to raise questions about where the WP:COI risks lie. The first does have WP:COI risks, but since no paid editing is done in article space, it is not clear what measures can be taken against it, and it seems analogous to the situation that Jimbo explicitly says is legitimate (i.e., commissioning a copyrighter to write GFDL copy). Should the editor be barred if they are a freelance copywriter? The second seems to be verifiably free of COI risk, but is paid editing in article space. — — Charles Stewart (talk) 13:37, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment
The only trouble with paid editing in general is biased (either positively or negatively) material about the subject. I have requested deletion of several promotional articles—most of which are done through speedy deletion. I often judge on the content of the article (which sometimes lead me to nominating corporate stubs for deletion).
Sticking to the more established Wikipedia policies about notability, advertising, and defamation, the only articles that can be deleted are those that are severely-biased and/or discussing about hardly-known subjects. As I have said outside Wikipedia:
“ | Anyone who would advertise paid editing of Wikipedia would lead the project into corruption. Why pay someone else if you can do it yourself? Wikipedia is open for everyone, without distinctions of any kind and without limitations in any manner. | ” |
I handled such a case some time ago. The report is just to show you the potential damages of paid editing, once tolerated too much. I don't want more of this to appear. Otherwise, entire corporations could wage edit wars against one another and they would go out of our control. Alexius08 ( talk) 02:50, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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Regarding that quote you wrote above, I found it kind of humorous. The entire point of your statement is that nobody who is paid to write should be editing Wikipedia, yet you finish off by contradicting yourself with, "Wikipedia is open for everyone, without distinctions of any kind and without limitations in any manner." -->David Shankbone 14:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
One problem I have seen arise from "paid editing" of one kind or another is scandals surrounding undisclosed edits from one organization or another. Most of this ultimately falls under WP:COI, but I do think that careful attention does need to be paid to edits made by people who are being paid to make them. In many cases the edits are not harmful (and can easily amount to having someone from an office patrol a page to watch for and revert vandalism), but there is always the chance that an attempt will be made to influence the direction of Wikipedia. This is particularly the case with political campaigns (I am made to think of the John Howard editing controversy some years back), but it can be the result of any group or organization (or even a person) desiring a better spin on themselves on here.
With this in mind, I believe that undeclared paid edits need to be made a blockable offence. This should probably only actually result in a block after a warning or two, but if someone is repeatedly influencing the viewpoint of an article and not declaring what is a very clear and present COI, then either the user needs to be tagged as having that COI or, in the interest of preserving impartiality, they need to be blocked. As to paid edits, I feel that they should be flagged for review; a "paid" grammar fix is not so bad, but many of these edits will not be simple corrections or vandalism reverts, and as such they do need some form of third-party review, which flagging would accomplish.
As I said, I do not see paid editing as inherently evil. It is when said editing is also undeclared and unmonitored that a problem will almost inevitably arise, and it is unmonitored, undeclared paid editing that needs to be banned. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tyrenon ( talk • contribs) 06:14, 15 June 2009
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I had a little poke around some paid editor havens and what I found was quite disturbing. A summary of my findings is Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Paid editing roundup*. WikiProject Spam would like your help in discovering who these guys are on Wikipedia and what they want to spam.
Even more disturbing is this one and this one (US$ 270), which only just concluded. It is starting to look like another sockpuppet. MER-C 07:34, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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All this talk over the merits or evils of "paid editing" misses the larger significance of having people editing Wikipedia for money, namely, that eventually not only will article-space edits be sold to the highest bidder (which people don't seem to have much of a problem with), but ALL edits will be bought and paid for, including administrator actions. Being paid for article editing just will "open the door" to the sale of all edits.
Erich Mendacio (
talk) 19:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Note: The person who made this statement has been indefinitely banned by the Wikipedia community, and is not permitted to edit Wikipedia pages (including this one) absent the ban being lifted. - Pete ( talk) 18:33, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
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Jimbo's statement notwithstanding, the current de facto policy is that known paid editors are treated as if they have a conflict of interest, all but eliminating any motivation to disclose. What's the point of paying someone if they are neutered in their ability to make the edits you want made? On the other hand if they are caught after the fact, they are banned for not disclosing and their edit history is gone over with a fine-toothed comb, again removing the benefit to the sponsor.
If we loosen this up and allow paid editors to make substantial edits, there is no going back, large swaths of Wikipedia will become commercialized within months if not weeks, established editors will quit in disgust, and the character and content of the project will change. On the other hand if we keep the status quo or implement an all-out ban we can loosen up a few years down the road if times and community consensus changes. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 01:56, 16 June 2009 (UTC) typo fixed 00:07, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
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If the article on Big Company X has sources to show that it cured world hunger, then it cured world hunger regardless of who edited the article. And if you want the article to say that Big Company X killed babies, then it's your responsibility to add those reliable sources to prove it. I have every right to start an article on myself that is supported by reliable sources and you have no right to accuse me of being non-neutral if you can't find sources to prove it.
I don't see where the hysteria's coming from. We (the real editors) aren't going anywhere. We've already found tons of paid editors, scrutinized their edit histories, went through all their articles, deleted the non-notable ones, removed the false facts, fixed the wording, added the negative facts that were omitted, slapped {neutrality} and {cleanup} templates all over everything, removed their admin status. We've done this over and over again. I see no reason why this would stop in the future. The prediction that "This will ruin us" is based on the supposition that there will be so many paid editors that we will not be able to control them. How is that economically feasible? We have 10,000,000 user accounts, assume 0.1% of those are active and you still have 10,000 users. No company is going to waste money fighting 10,000 people to keep their articles pristine when there are much easier ways to get a Google presence. We will always outnumber the paid editors and we will always be around to go through and get their articles in line. This dystopia will never happen.
Of course we should find the paid editors, pick on them, fix their articles, scrutinize everything they've done. We should have a task force that just does that. But deleting an article on a notable topic because it's not neutral? That doesn't make any sense at all. That's like deleting a notable article because it's full of typos or doesn't have inline citations; that's like deleting an article on a notable band because it talks about how great they are. If a subject is not notable, delete it immediately with extreme prejudice and don't look back. If it's notable, there's no justification at all for deleting it, and there's no justification at all for banning the user who made it. Fix the problems or put a template on it and let someone else do it.
Look at these articles. Brad Sugars Ken Underwood These articles suck. They are laughably awful. All paid articles will be. We've (the real editors) been editing this encyclopedia for years, we've evaluated FAs, we've had our articles meticulously criticized, we know exactly what NPOV looks like and this crap sticks out like a sore thumb. Let the paid users edit, watch what they do and fix it when it sucks. That's what we do here.
"Allowing" paid edits doesn't mean you have to leave them in place. If they make the encyclopedia worse, undo them. Just like anything else. The idea that paid shills will all become admins en masse and take over the encyclopedia is laughable. There's a long, arduous process for becoming an admin and a blatantly poor edit history will stop it in its tracks. Admins have already been removed for non-neutrality, and will continue to.
There's no need for this apocalypse talk and there's no need to go around banning people. They are still contributing, they're just contributing their side. The encyclopedia is never harmed by information as long as it's verifiable. No, it won't always work. Lots of spam articles will slip through the cracks. But that's going to be the case whether you ban these people or not, just as there will always be non-notable band articles and poorly cited history articles and former featured articles that completely fell apart. It's not perfect but there's no reason to get upset about that.
Summary: I'm strongly in favor of treating COI and paid editing just like any other bad editing. If an article has a problem, fix it or put it through the appropriate process. If you can't point out a demonstrable problem, then you have no right to assume their is one just because money changed hands, and you have no right to accuse an editor of being a bad editor based on his financial interests alone. This does not mean that we need to sit back and let this turn into McPedia. We can watch out for this stuff and track everything these users are doing, but we should resolve it the same way we resolve everything else. Sockpuppetry is still an offense, revert wars are still an offense, inserting false information and removing real information is still an offense. There will never be enough momentum for this to "ruin us". — Werson ( talk) 22:24, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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At the end of the day, paid writing happens on Wikipedia. Jimmy is content with keeping it underground and illicit, but I think his perspective does not consider a fundamental challenge that time poses to Wikipedia's growth. As our rules, guidelines, culture and bureaucracy become more complex, it becomes more difficult to break our surface. Our wikified article text and templates, and in particular our eye-crossing citation layouts, separate text in ways that are too bizarre to stare at for even a trained eye (mine). Our edit boxes used to be more clean. Our bureaucracy and rules, and the nuances in them, are a challenge to comprehend. Even seasoned editors are continually--and incorrectly--told that they are at the wrong place to have a problem addressed. After a recent media event, it's been heavily reported that we have a "Supreme Court".
Nobody but a small subset (you and me) wants to learn all of this! It is a challenge for a person, or company, to become involved in navigating our weird world. In my experience, article subjects have disastrously horrible attempts to talk with us and learn our MOS, policies and guidelines. Examples are too numerous to mention.
If nobody cares about the subject, it sits there dead in the water, hurting us, hurting them, with either misinformation or WEIGHT problems. We see this over and over. It hurts our reputation. It makes us appear clannish and insular; impossible to understand outside a massive investment of time. We seem ambivalent to the real-life consequences a bad article has for a subject that none of us cares about. We can be inadvertently, and sometimes intentionally, insulting when we do interact with a subject reaching out. There are good experiences, but the bad ones are legendary.
Paid writing helps resolve an inevitable problem of time: our increasingly labyrinthine internal structure.
Everyone is worried about PR hounds and infomercial products. That will be out there, but it is now as well. That ignores that there's a real world out there that both Jimmy and I have interacted with. I would find it hard to believe if Jimmy said he has not come across many people in the last eight years who would simply love just to pay someone to write a decent, balanced article about them than what they found. In my experience, these people are fine with paying someone for their knowledge to fix it. These people have limited time, and their wikignorant assistants fare little better. I think it's an unfair response to them to say: wait until somebody feels like it.
You don't have to ask Jimmy and me, you can ask OTRS. They hear problems all the time that could be resolved if the subject had the option to engage an editor to fix a meritorious, but perhaps complex, problem. A WikiProject could be set up. Editors could register to accept such work, and when engaged, would register the work to be completed. I envision a community-wide opportunity; run in above-board system where neutral editors who don't even know a subject could work on their articles. Registration, a code of ethics, a likely army of on- and off-site oversight would make policy-compliant improvements and everyone much better off in the attainment of WP:ENC. I think it's a fair and just option, particularly for BLPs. -->David Shankbone 01:31, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I've thought a lot about this and my position on the matter is a bit radical. I don't just think paid editing should be permitted; I think it should be actively encouraged. Paid editing and volunteer editing can safely coexist, just as commercial photography and freely-licensed photography coexist. The benefits of paid editing are numerous:
There is often a tacit assumption that all or most paid editing would be promotional of a single commercial entity - but there are countless additional channels for income. Professional organizations often want to see expansion in their area of profession to generate interest in the area among students selecting a career. The many tiny foreign-language Wikipedias can benefit from recruiting poor native speakers who otherwise could not afford to contribute. People from a little-known culture or with a scholarly interest in an esoteric area may want to see coverage of that area expanded for the sake of posterity. Effectively, the charity is transplanted from the contributors directly donating their time to third parties donating money to a specific cause.
It is often claimed that if a user is paid to cover a subject, they will be motivated to portray it in a biased light to please their employer. The fact is, however, that the market doesn't work like that. Users who write biased articles will be banned or blocked, and their articles rapidly removed - as a consequence, people stop hiring them, because they can't achieve results. Only people who work with the system, follow policy, and create realistic expectations with their clients, will achieve long-term success as a paid editor, and other paid editors will follow their example in the hopes of similar success. Our ability to police contributions and impose sanctions, and the interaction of this with the market, is the only defense against biased paid editors that we require.
Of course paid editing is a manifest conflict of interest, but this is dealt with effectively by our existing policy, which specifies that such conflicts should be openly declared. Restriction of paid editing only forces users to hide these concerns.
Another objection I've often heard is that the presence of paid users is a discouragement to volunteer contributors. In analogy with many jobs like photography and software development, paid editors and volunteer editors can happily coexist - studies on motivation of Wikipedia users point to factors like community recognition and a feeling of impact that don't go away just because paid editors show up. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that paid editors will supplant volunteer users, partly because they will tend to edit different topic areas (generally, areas that require expansion and have few interested editors at present), and partly because paid editors and volunteer editors can effectively cooperate. Some users may be driven off by the presence of paid editors out of a sense of ideological purity, but I believe the benefits as enumerated above would be vastly more beneficial to the project as a whole.
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I don't find paid editing to be be anything wrong if the article follows the basic Wikipedia norms of WP:NPOV, WP:RS and other manuals. However a message can be put on the top saying that it is a paid edited article and need to be verified by an administrator for accuracy. The ultimate benefit is of the Wikipedia if it gets a good article out of a paid editing. Moreover, many users often write article which are closely linked to them, though they are not paid they may contain some conflict of interest contents. And for some students it can obviously help them to support their huge cost of education. Amartyabag TALK2ME 13:01, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
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Let me say this simply: paid editing should be allowed, if disclosed. Why should we care what is the editors motivation for creating articles? People do it because of various reasons, not all of them pure and altruistic. What about editors who create articles not for money but to please someone or as a favor? What about students creating articles for an assignment, and getting paid in (hopefully) good grades? What about editors creating articles to get wiki awards? We shouldn't care if somebody is doing this for $, as long as content is good (npov, notable, etc.) and this is disclosed (for COI-npov analysis). In the end, there should be only one question to ask: has Nichalp articles helped Wikipedia or not? -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 16:30, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia rests on a universal assumption of good faith -- the concept that every editor's top priority is to improve WP. It is this presumption that allows us to strive for consensus rather than see every dispute as a battle. Even the most biased editor can still put improving the project first and can thus be reasoned with. Of course, there are some few editors out there who don't put the project first, but they ultimately get censured or banned unless they are very sneaky, because there incompatible motivations eventually lead them to misconduct. This enforcement allows the contributing community to maintain a certain necessary level of faith in one another.
Allowing paid editors would erode this system. Where a biased editor can still put WP first despite their bias, a paid editor fundamentally has a higher master: their employer. By explicitly accepting paid editors, we would be endorsing an abandonment of our underlying principle for editor conduct: when you're editing on Wikipedia, improving the project comes first. Ultimately it comes to this: despite any bias, while contributing is an editor's allegiance first to Wikipedia or to something else? If its to something else, they shouldn't be welcome. No paid editing.
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I have three basic points that I don't think I've seen anybody else address:
What follows is a tldr analysis of why it will be hard to define "paid advocacy" distinctly from other forms of paid editing, including types that have previously not been controversial, and other types that while controversial arguably have some merits. It is not an essential component of my statement, but does explain the chain of reasoning that led me to the three conclusions above, and should be very relevant to anyone trying to draft a definition for a policy on "paid advocacy". It is entirely possible to agree with some or all of the three conclusions for completely different reasons :)
Reasoning and examples for these conclusions
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Consider a payment to write general articles about green energy made by an environmental charity, a non-profit organization such as a think tank, a governmental energy department, or a power company. Which of these is "most wrong"? Is one "more bannable" than the others? They all seem likely to emphasize viewpoints favorable to green energy. My (politically leftist) gut instinct feels that the power company is "worse", but actually that's because I'm thinking about the motivation of the client, not the editor. If the contract was simply to write articles on green energy, then the editor has the same motivation in every case. Admittedly the editor may take the views of the client into particular account if remuneration is at their discretion, but we shouldn't assume the biases and motivations of the client are simply transplanted into the editor. For instance, an editor would not seek to cultivate a reputation on-wiki as a POV-pusher, especially a paid-for one, so is strongly incentivized to follow many of our content and conduct restrictions. I also suspect that some of my discomfort with paid editing is due to me projecting my distaste for corporations and celebrities - key users of public relations - onto paid editors who might provide services for them. But it seems likely that editors being paid by charities, think tanks, qangos or governmental departments would all face similar conflicts of interest and would have similar motivations and pressure when editing. The identity of the client should not be the determining factor used to define the wikicrime of "paid advocacy". Perhaps a better factor to consider is the (essentially contractual) nature of the client-editor relationship. If the contract rewards the creation or maintenance of an article that is broadly sympathetic to the client or its views, this would be the example par excellence of paid advocacy. This is the scenario waving the red flag right now. Yet perhaps even here the situation is more complex than it seems. Can we imagine circumstances where an editor can satisfy our content and conduct requirements (possibly in a slightly revised form) impeccably while fulfilling such contractual obligations? What if the COI is declared in some open way (the top of the article talk page seems logical, as with {{ Notable Wikipedian}}) and the edits are suitably scrutinized (for instance, if they are always discussed on the talk page first except in cases covered by WP:BLP)? My viewpoint on this is skewed by my memories of the days prior to BLP, when instances arose where {{ sofixit}} was waved in the faces of people who discovered inaccuracies or unbalanced slants in their own biographies, as if the cyber-cosmic punishment for becoming a person of note was to be landed with the responsibility for regularly checking and maintaining your Wikipedia article. The dangerous fallacy had arisen that "anyone can edit" means "everybody is an editor" - but as our labyrinth of policies, guidelines and even editing syntax becomes more impregnable, that is clearly unrealizable. What difference does it make if instead of the subject commenting on the talk page or removing an obvious untruth, their wiki-literate PR agent does? Mostly a positive one, I expect: the agent would be more familiar with content requirements and editing procedure, and might well have excellent records of press coverage meeting WP:RS (including knowing if a report contained factual errors; on semi-obscure biographies with few available sources I've often found that the quality of sources is low too, so such personal knowledge is especially useful). There are thousands of articles on minor actors, musicians and writers, where I would rest easier knowing that a suitably experienced PR agent was watching over them, rather than relying on our internal unsystematic monitoring. Yeah, OTRS exists, and for discretion it's obviously a superior method for agents to use. But I can imagine some gains from allowing a subject's representatives to feed into the editing process (even if limited to talk page discussions and non-controversial edits) in an open, more clearly regulated way. Much of this applies to articles on companies too. Some of the contracts that sparked the current furore, however, were not of the red-flagged, "payment for positive coverage" type, but "payment for coverage at all". Many more people, products and organizations meet our criteria for notability than we have the capacity to create articles for. Having even a neutral, non-promotional Wikipedia article might be vanity for an individual, or of commercial value to a company, but creating an article here is actually pretty hard (both technically and to demonstrate satisfaction of inclusion criteria) so the growth of a market for relevant expertise is unsurprising. Many of the advertisements made clear that they did not seek a whitewash, just a relatively short, neutral, well-referenced article. So long as the notability criteria are actually met, and there's nothing wrong with the article content, it's not obvious what harm is caused by users working under such a contract. Certainly this would introduce a systemic coverage bias among justabout-notable companies, favoring those prepared to pay for coverage, but we already have biases in favor of those that just so happen to be local to active Wikipedians, have Wikipedians among their staff, or occupy a niche market that a Wikipedian is interested in. Some advantages are also evident: the company may well possess good records of prior press coverage, and provide quality, free media - the latter may be difficult or impossible to obtain independently, particularly things like photographs of a factory floor. This type of contract seems to me to be a "yellow flag" - I'd rather regulate it (I'd prefer full COI disclosure on talk pages, and perhaps that a userfied version is independently vetted before being moved to mainspace) than ban anyone found doing it. Because of the circumstances of this discussion, the focus has largely been on editors freelancing for contracts. The Greenspun project involved WMF paying illustrators to create content, an indication there is no blanket rule against paid contributions (although in that case the pay was open, public, and not from an external organization). Pfctdayelise mentioned German government editing subsidies. Other users have noted other types of paid editing e.g. an employee working in company time (pfctdayelise mentions User:Linguistlist); and by analogy the student working for a grade (a non-financial reward, but still an example of someone not working for personal satisfaction, and systemically biasing our articles in favor of their client/professor's field). There is no reason immediately clear to me, to distinguish this kind of situation from that of freelancers. One user account not yet mentioned is User:Nttc, used by the Northern Territory tourist board, relatively uncontroversially. That account was not only one externally paid, but the tourist board had an inherently promotional agenda; the "product" they were selling was the Northern Territory as a tourist destination. Seeking to improve coverage of NT in Wikipedia was a laudable aim, and they were able to contribute some very nice photographs from their website. Would the nature of their work have an impact on their Wikipedia contributions? They presumably had a slant biased to the view that NT is both beautiful and tourist-friendly, and I'm sure that is reflected at least subconsciously in their edits. How would we evaluate whether this counted as part of the crime of "paid advocacy"? Is it damning evidence that Tourism NT is essentially a promotional body, whereas we might be more lenient to some other official bodies? Would we allow a case for the defense, that the edits were all in good faith and from a neutral point of view? Actually I can't recall Nttc being particularly controversial at the time, so in the past we've accepted this as "green flag". I am unconvinced that we can rely on the nature of the contract between editor and client to determine whether we have a case of disallowed "advocacy" or acceptable editing. For those editors who edit as part of their full time work for an organization,it's hard to determine what "promotional" or "advocacy" might mean, especially when editing is done on articles of interest to the organization, as with Linguistlist and Nttc, rather than on the article about the organization itself. Even in the case of freelancers, where the contract is likely to be explicit about whether or not remuneration depends on the article paid for being acceptable to the commissioner (which is surely the essential gap between advocacy, and just doing someone's wikiwork for them), these contractual details are likely to be kept private. We could force editors to disclose them, but we'd have no means of verification in case they just lied. The only remaining option I cans see is to consider the user's contributions and conduct to determine if their editing has crossed into the realms of "paid advocacy". Even this is very tough. We know that "red flag" (paid to give a positive slant) editing goes on today, right now, undisclosed, particularly by publicists. I'm not convinced that it will be easy to pick up distinctly. A history of one-sided, favorable edits to an up-and-coming singer is more parsimoniously interpreted as the work of a fan. Not ideal behavior, and possibly sanctionable, but even if we believe that one-sided editing due to payment is far worse than one-sided editing due to irrational fandom, it will be a brave admin who declares "my guess is that you're getting paid for this, so I'm banning you". For semi-obscure authors, often the only substantial source available for articles is the (naturally promotional) cover blurb they get. Who can tell if it has been inserted into the article by their agent or publisher, rather than an avid reader? Corporate spam and vanity businessperson biographies are perhaps more visible on the radar, since fandom is less likely. Even so, a competent editor of the "yellow flag" type (making new content in reasonable, neutral articles) could probably operate undetected and even pick up a string of WP:DYKss and WP:GAs, without leaving any concrete evidence that they'd been paid to do so. Even some POV-pushing and reputation-polishing can probably slip through: an article may be apparently "neutral" due to the editor consciously ignoring negative coverage of the client and only including sources which are themselves broadly neutral; or only including one piece of criticism (from many) and contrasting it against a rare piece of praise. If anybody picks the editor up on the last point, they could probably reply that they'd innocently misjudged the balance of sources. Perhaps ironically, the "green flag" cases such as User:Nttc are more likely to show up as paid editors (in that case it was obvious since text and images were being copied from NT Tourism's website), but determining whether they cross into "advocacy" territory is actually a tough judgment. It's worth bearing in mind that somebody working for an organization will have their own points of view that slips into their editing, not just those of the employer; further, it's likely that in many cases their biases will match the employer's (somebody working to promote tourism in NT is unlikely to believe NT is a horrible, ugly place... if slightly too effusive language slipped in, for instance, how can you tell if it's their point of view or one they are being paid to promote?). I think this summarizes why it will often be a tough judgment call to work out if someone is actually being paid at all, or in other cases to determine if paid editing transcends acceptability and becomes bannable "advocacy". It seems likely that off-wiki sleuthing is more likely to produce confident accusations of abuse than on-wiki evidence. This will favor people and organizations with the wherewithal to obtain PR strategists with Wikipedia expertise (presumably they are more notable, already have articles they seek to influence, and are likely to engage in "red flag" editing) and instead, as happened this time, flag up a lot of "yellow flag" instances, where smaller players on the borderlines of notability were using freelancing noticeboards to seek the expertise needed to give them an article. Relying on off-wiki evidence is clearly not a perfect solution either. I'm not really offering a solution, if only because I can't see one, at least in any detail. A blanket ban on any form of paid editing is possible, although we know that many kinds of editing are essentially undetectable and are likely only to become more secretive. In a funny way that could be a good thing - the closer an editor follows content and conduct requirements, the less detectable the fact they were (blockworthily) paid for it is. On the other hand it is clear that some productive content creation, and possible new paradigms of editing (linguistlist, nttc) will be lost. If the ban is not blanket, then the criteria for identifying "paid advocacy", including the strength of evidence required, will have to be very carefully drawn up - it certainly can't be left to an admin's common sense - and some attention should be drawn to the different costs and benefits that alternative definitions might have. My main hope is that it would be easier to draw a clear distinction between acceptable and unacceptable paid editing, if there were clear regulations on paid editing - some possibilities include compulsory disclosure, perhaps some forms of editing restrictions, potentially a paid editor's views to have lesser weight when seeking consensus on issues like WP:UNDUE? If this was implemented, the discovery of undisclosed paid editing for instance might immediately result in banning (and not just "please send an explanation to the arbitration committee"). In the case of paid article creation in the case of justabout-notable subjects, compulsory independent assessment of a userfied version might prevent the (unknowable) issue of whether or not the editor is being remunerated for being sympathetic to the subject from being seen as key to acceptability of conduct (although it still raises the risk of experienced editors playing a game of "push what it's possible to get away with and still be deemed acceptably neutral"). Nothing would solve the problem that many editors can and will get away with paid editing, without anyone noticing (or at least being able to prove their suspicions). I've not yet seen anybody produce a coherent possible set of rules for "acceptable" paid editing, if such a thing can be deemed to exist, and I don't believe current COI rules are sufficient. So perhaps my hopes that a new such set of rules would make "paid advocacy" more clearly distinguishable are optimistic. At any rate there are no easy answers. |
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I've long been of the opinion that the real problem is not so much "paid editing" or "paid advocacy", which as noted by many above raise difficult problems of proof and may conflict with the assume good faith requirement. But I think that the truth will out by the (lack of) quality prose and blatant WP:NPOV violations that are going to be found in most truly problematic articles. Spam tends to be patent nonsense as far as I am concerned. Being written in pointy haired boss talk is a dead giveaway. If:
And where the specific concern arises -- paid insertions by non-notable businesses -- the promotional style and intentional NPOV violations will cause any such article to be filled with these obvious stylistic and content flaws. On the other hand, if the article or edit is written in plain English rather than promotional twaddle, and appears to be neutral and referenced, speculation about the editors' motives seems to be mostly irrelevant. The alternative solution is fairly zealous speedy deletion of strongly promotional POV articles about non-consumer business topics.
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Comment:
Just adding a datapoint here. People have been not only openly paid to edit in the past, but the person who came up with the idea was highly praised for his creative experiment. Kasper Souren gave a talk about how he did this at the 2006 Wikimania conference for the Bambara Wikipedia. Unilaterally banning anyone who does this, without any exceptions, is a hasty & potentially harmful idea -- & anyone who is familiar with the Wiimedia projects would know this. -- llywrch ( talk) 16:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
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This is pretty fascinating. I can see how this is controversial and there is always the rule of unintended consequences. I don't see why it shouldn't be allowed. It would be better for transparency in paid editing rather than having anon editors possibly with agendas being paid to secretly influence content. If we're going to do this there should obviously be some set of caveats. One would be to only allow full disclosure of paid editing. If an editor does not disclose they are being paid it should be a bannable offense. Another worry is, although paid editors say they will conform to policy, will they gain enough clout to influence the wording of policy in their favour? I can see a provision where a paid editor has to waive their rights in policy discussion to avoid any conflicts of interest (real or perceived) issues.
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Admittedly I haven't read this entire page (way too long), but I do find the idea of blocking any "paid editor" frankly appalling and contrary to the spirit of putting free content before the "social aspects" of the site. Our license (be it GFDL or the CC license we have chosen to adopt) is quite clear that our content is free for commercial use as well as educational use. While that might in some way seem neither here nor there, it could have bearing on outside organizations that might want to clean up Wikipedia content along a certain theme for eventual use in a publication. For example, say the Pennsylvania department of forestry wanted to put together a mini-encyclopedia about all of the plants, animals, and other organisms that live in Pennsylvania forests. It seems to me there would be nothing wrong with them doing a "roll call" for experienced Wikipedia researchers, botanists, and copy-editors to improve the articles here on Wikipedia rather than importing them to another site and then searching high and low for staff with similar skill sets. If they offer a few bucks for "adopting" articles or groups of articles, I think that would be excellent. And: if they're paying people to do the content improving here on Wikipedia rather than on their private mirror, we all benefit from the added and/or improved content, and they benefit from having thousands of other eyes potentially picking out grammatical or factual errors.
I have actually done paid editing (in a sense) on Wikibooks in the past, and hope to do more of it in the future. Part of my "real life job" involves researching horticultural topics (primarily plants and the things that harm them), and I always add this content to Wikibooks (as well as photos to Commons, and I generally try to improve the WP article as well if I come across encyclopedic material that belongs there). I don't think most of my clients particularly care that I post it on Wikimedia sites, but I do so because I believe in free content, and hope that my work will be improved upon when someone else happens upon new scientific data or finds something I missed.
So to reiterate: blocking any editor who stands to make a few bucks for helping to create quality content is a Very Bad Idea. Advocacy is a completely different thing of course, but (despite what you might think if you only ready the noticeboards) most of Wikipedia's content does not have anything to do with BLP's, companies, or politics. Subtlety is called for, not jerky knees and witch hunts.
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Paid editing raises a second issue that is, as far as I can see, completely unadressed above: copyright. Depending on 1) the relationship between the person paid and the person paying and 2) the legal jurisdiction governing that relationship the writer may or may not have copyright in the words they are writing, and thus may or may not be able to release them under the free content license used by Wikipedia. See work for hire. This creates an obvious problem for the ability of the paid editor to actually produce content that Wikipedia can use. There is no point in having an editor producing content that we would have to delete for copyright reasons.
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Comment:
Many of my thoughts on this matter have been adequately addressed in the twenty-fourth paragraph of George Washington's Farewell Address, particularly in the last two sentences. What isn't covered therein I will cover below.
The main point that has been raised is that paid edits are not necessarily bad. This is true when the person paying is unrelated to the subject of the article he or she wants improved, an event whose happening I have considerable difficulty imagining, or when the article has BLP violations, which should be directed to the OTRS queue. If the subject in the latter case paid someone to fix the article, the paid editor would very likely give the subject his money's worth in "improvements," which is exactly why those violations should be reported to OTRS. The very, very likely scenario would play out something like this:
There is nothing wrong with editing an article with which you have a conflict of interest if you follow NPOV, V, RS, etc., but that standard is generally only observed by active users—that is, users who have actually read the core policies, respect objectivity, and uphold neutrality. The paid revisers of these articles generally would not be active users, would not have read the policies, and would respect only the money that they will receive for their services.
If we permit paid editing, no, we will not be completely inundated with adverts, and the site's administration will not be dominated by corporate interests. And yes, we do have spam articles now; but if we allow paid editing, we will certainly receive more advert-edits than before, which will make us look more like Google than Wikipedia. This same sort of situation always seems to play out on this site with politics, so I'll draw a parallel to lobbyists: They are paid to look out in the government for interest groups, which I view as contrary to the spirit of democracy, much like I view paid editing as contrary to the spirit of a free encyclopedia (in both the copyright sense and the "free-as-in-freedom" sense). As mentioned in the sections above, maybe we would glean some FAs from it, but we can do that with volunteer editors and without the increased amount of unnoticed spam that would come with paid editing.
Summary: The potential negatives of paid editing far outweigh the possible positives. Though paid editing could possibly be used for some beneficent purposes, such as those noted in some of the sections above, the very likely scenarios for its use would be for propaganda or advertising. If you want to advertise, use Google, or start your own wiki. The positive things that paid editing could accomplish can henceforth be and have hitherto been done by volunteer work. This is a free encyclopedia. We need editors, not mercenaries.
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There are far too many statements on this page. For this level of discussion activity, the "Statement/Endorse" approach isn't very helpful. Really we need to find a way to be able to create collaborative Position Statements, and thereby (a) limit the number of statements (b) focus on the arguments and (c) use the same approach we do to articles, which has a certain appealing philosophical consistency.
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Comments:
Evidently, my fellow wikipedians have a short memory span.
Just recently, we encountered this exact situation sans the money with Scientology articles. There, the last resort was the unilateral blocking of all isp addresses from the church due to a never ending war of opinions, and these were from people who were not being paid to edit the articles in question. How much more so will the situation here spiral out if money is added to the equation.
Additionally, there is the matter of being paid to edit a non-profit project. Being paid by a third party to edit on a non-profit organization defeats the entire purpose of a website where people volunteer their time because they believe in the mission and the purpose. What we lack for in income for our editing we make up for internally through our awards and prizes and the occasional mention in offline publication. If that was not enough incentive to contribute originally then why should money serve to lure in new contributors.
Then their is the matter of the community as a whole. A house divided against itself can not stand, and if we embrace paid editing then it is my firm belief that Wikipedia will not be able to endure a split between those who accept payment for article development and thus have a vested interest in maintain the articles and those who contribute to the articles for the purpose upon which the site was founded - expanding human knowledge. In effect, we are discussing a permanent change to wikipedia, and it does invite all manner of bad company to the site.
Lastly, with growing number of online wikis out there, it is my belief that we can safely pass on the money-for-edits position. I have no doubt that sooner or later, if it has not happened already, someone will establish a wiki somewhere with this exact goal in mind, and we can point money for articles people there and they can make all the money they want on another site.
The bottom line, to borrow from Kirill Lokshin's advise to coordinators of the Military history project: "The status quo is generally a stable position, if nothing else; maintaining it for a while longer is unlikely to be as controversial as changing it." — TomStar81 ( Talk) 05:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
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In my opinion anyone means anyone. Everyone should be able to edit Wikipedia no matter he\she is or isn't paid. SkyBon Talk\ Contributions 19:23, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
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I am an outsider less than I am a Wikipedia editor, as I am very new and have only begun to edit articles. So please take that into consideration that this is an outsider's view.
I think that this discussion gets to the heart and soul of Wikipedia. I can understand why Mr. Wales takes the position that he does, as he founded this website and clearly has a utopian and idealistic view of its mission and purpose. The idea that somebody unaffiliated with Wikipedia would use Wikipedia for commercial purposes is antithetical to that view.
I personally don't care one way or the other about that, but I do think that explicitly endorsing paid editing would be very bad for Wikipedia's image, and would remove any tenuous hold it may have on integrity. It is bad enough that Wikipedia has a reputation for inaccuracy. We all know that. It is a subject of ridicule. Were Wikipedia to explicitly allow paid editing, however defined, it would be a green light for swarms of public relations firms to come to Wikipedia on behalf of their clients, both to create articles and to edit the ones that are there.
Some say that Wikipedia's volunteers and policies could prevent paid editing from affecting the content. I disagree. There are millions of articles, the vast majority of which appear to get very little attention from anybody. Some are blatant advertising. Some are obviously written by their subjects. The existence of such articles is bad enough, but I cannot understand why Wikipedia would open the door to even more of them.
As I said, this is the view of an outsider, a new user here, but I think what I am saying would be said by many if not most other people who just use Wikipedia as a source and possibly even trust it. Jay Tepper ( talk) 14:32, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
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Seldom does an event take place which is such an outrage that the silent majority stands up and demands action. But the silent majority is currently demanding that something be done about the wikipedia community request for comments process. But first, let me pose you a question: Is the wikipedia community request for comments process actually concerned about any of us or does it just want to inject even more fear and divisiveness into political campaigns? After reading this letter, you'll really find it's the latter. The foregoing greatly simplifies the real situation but it does indicate in a rough, general way that far too many people tolerate the wikipedia community request for comments process's homilies as long as they're presented in small, seemingly harmless doses. What these people fail to realize, however, is that the hour is late indeed. Fortunately, it's not yet too late to offer true constructive criticism—listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem. My argument is that the wikipedia community request for comments process takes a perverse pleasure in watching people scurry about like rats in a maze, never quite managing to knock some sense into it. Ridiculous? Not so.
I would decidedly not have thought it possible that even if the wikipedia community request for comments process's sound bites were utterly successful in making a few people feel better, they would still be demeaning to everyone else, but it's true. Life isn't fair. We've all known this since the beginning of time, so why is the wikipedia community request for comments process so compelled to complain about situations over which it has no control? This is not a question that we should run away from. Rather, it is something that needs to be addressed quickly and directly because the wikipedia community request for comments process would have us believe that all it takes to solve our social woes are shotgun marriages, heavy-handed divorce laws, and a return to some mythical 1950s Shangri-la. That, of course, is nonsense, total nonsense. But the wikipedia community request for comments process is surrounded by complacent quiddlers who parrot the same nonsense, which is why it is a wee bit overzealous in its defense of anti-intellectualism. The best example of this, culled from many, would have to be the time it tried to divert our attention from serious issues. The wikipedia community request for comments process maintains that either it can override nature or that obscurantism is a viable and vital objective for our nation's educational institutions. The wikipedia community request for comments process denies any other possibility.
If the wikipedia community request for comments process gets its way, I might very well feel disconnected from reality. Because I unfortunately lack the psychic powers that enable the wikipedia community request for comments process to "know" matters for which there is no reliable evidence, I cannot forecast when it will next try to erode constitutional principles that have shaped our society and remain at the core of our freedom and liberty. But I can definitely say that difficult times lie ahead. Fortunately, we have the capacity to circumvent much of the impending misery by working together to drag the wikipedia community request for comments process in front of a tribunal and try it for its crimes against humanity.
Don't get me wrong; mankind, with all of its accumulated knowledge, wonderful machines, scientific methods, and material power, still has much to fear from laughable, obscene hatemongers like the wikipedia community request for comments process. But the wikipedia community request for comments process once tried convincing me that anyone who disagrees with it is ultimately ruthless. Does it think I was born yesterday? I mean, it seems pretty obvious that that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. I don't mean to throw fuel on an already considerable fire, but the wikipedia community request for comments process's imprecations were never about tolerance and equality. That was just window dressing for the "innocents". Rather, the wikipedia community request for comments process wants to extract obscene salaries and profits from corporations that insist that our society be infested with Pyrrhonism, sensationalism, quislingism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". What does it think it is? I mean, I would never take a job working for it. Given its infantile teachings, who would want to?
The wikipedia community request for comments process has hatched all sorts of whiney plans. Remember its attempt to substitute pap for art? No? That's because the wikipedia community request for comments process's so good at concealing its irritable activities. It's a well-known fact that the wikipedia community request for comments process's trucklers care more about speaking, acting, and even thinking like the wikipedia community request for comments process than they care about what makes sense. It's an equally well-known fact that the wikipedia community request for comments process quite likes using the old La patrie en danger ruse to garner support for its plan to delegitimize our belief systems and replace them with a counter-hegemony that seeks to till the hostile side of the Comstockism garden. When logic puts these two facts together, the necessary result is an understanding that if it can give us all a succinct and infallible argument proving that "the norm" shouldn't have to worry about how the exceptions feel, I will personally deliver its Nobel Prize for Chthonic Rhetoric. In the meantime, the wikipedia community request for comments process seems to have recently added the word "institutionalization" to its otherwise simplistic vocabulary. I suppose it intends to use big words like that to obscure the fact that there are few certainties in life. I have counted only three: death, taxes, and the wikipedia community request for comments process announcing some backwards thing every few weeks. It is time for someone to make efforts directed towards broad, long-term social change. Will that someone be you?
Maybe it helps to think of this as a dada statement of process appraisal. Privatemusings ( talk) 11:25, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I am an experienced paid editor of content suitable for Wikipedia. When I was under contract with a person or corporation to write a new article about said person or corporation, I had very, very, very little interest in presenting an "advocacy" position on behalf of that entity. Rather, success is measured in durability within Wikipedia, so my highest priority was...
How do I write (and publish) this article in such a way that it passes WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS, and all the other WP:things, while simultaneously NOT DRAWING THE ATTENTION of the Hive?
Guess what? The articles that resulted were pretty bland, not puff pieces, quite encyclopedic, and (ever since I learned this technique) 100% durable within Wikipedia -- with surprisingly little follow-up maintenance, and likewise lasting appreciation of my clients.
That's why I believe those who oppose paid editing are thinking one-dimensionally, and they often feel the need to frame such workers as "paid shills" and other likewise pejorative terms. In order to rally equally one-dimensional followers, critics of paid editing must demonize the paid editing effort; I imagine because it is potentially, in fact, so non-sinister in its undetectability. My paid content was and remains virtually indistinguishable from the other content found on Wikipedia, except for the fact that, perhaps, it is of a higher encyclopedic and "neutral" quality.
I remain unwilling to disclose my still-undetected paid content contributions to Wikipedia (for the obvious reason that I wish not to feed those who seek revenge on me); however, if you wish to see an example of a similarly-written article, then you may visit the article about National Fuel Gas and compare how it started with how it exists presently. This article was written without request nor payment, but it mimics the style of my other paid content contributions.
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Yeah, I'm late to the party.
Paid editing is going to happen. Paid editing is happening. Pretending we can ban it is not realistic.
What we need to do is to get it out in the open so we can monitor the articles for neutrality, COI and so on. I'd favor allowing openly acknowledged paid editing, with the articles being tagged with a template or something, together with a ban on covert paid editing. This would give a powerful incentive for paid editors to do things publicly and above board with no fear of retribution. But if we discover that people are doing it covertly -- and given that they will likely need to advertise, we've got a reasonable chance of finding them sooner or later -- the assumption will be that they've got something to hide. Because they'll have no reason to hide if they're willing to follow our policies. Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 03:10, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
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Contract killings are going to happen. Contract killings are happening. Pretending we can ban them is not realistic. What we need to do is to get it out in the open. We need a policy to regulate contract killers and require them to declare themselves openly. We can offer incentives so that they will identify themselves. Etc., etc., etc. (The same argument, especially the first three sentences, could be made about any other criminal or socially undesirable activity; the latter might actually make closer analogies.) Finell (Talk) 22:43, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
I've got mixed feelings about this. I certainly agree with the viewpoint that paid editing is going on and there's really no way to stop it. I also agree with the sentiment that as long as the resultant articles stick to our policies, then there's no problem. Also, I suppose it isn't all that different from the bounty board. There's just something that bothers me about the notion of people being paid externally to edit Wikipedia. It might be more acceptable to people if it's required that paid users disclose their clients, but there's really no way to enforce that. While editors could be blocked for paid editing, unless the editor him/herself admitted to being paid, it would be nigh impossible to prove. Another thing to consider is that as long as the pages are being reviewed for GA, A, and FA classes, there'll be people checking them for bias. Ultimately, I think we've been presented with a fait accompli; paid editing is going on and we can't stop it. As uncomfortable as it might make some us, the best course of action is to just accept the situation as it is and move on with our wiki-lives. Parsecboy ( talk) 20:15, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
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What can you say about this? It was listed as a good article on January 2009, despite citing primary sources six times and authored by User:Zithan, an editor proven to be hired for doing it. Alexius08 ( talk) 13:22, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
2. He commits to not use any sock-puppets. 3. He commits to abide by all the policies of Wikipedia. -- Gurubrahma ( talk) 16:28, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
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Add your statement, leave one copy of the section at the bottom.
Paid editors are just like any user editing his or her own article. It should be permitted subject to the WP:COI restrictions. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 19:13, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
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This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
This page in a nutshell: This was a
Request for comment on
paid editing. No clear consensus emerged from the discussion.
Rootology's opening view was that motivation for editing is not important, it is the end result of that editing - the content - that matters. They asserted that if the content is policy compliant, there shouldn't be a problem, and this viewpoint received 102 support votes, the most of any statement. While there were few other statements directly in favour of paid editing, iridescent felt allowing it would be a net positive because a declaration of intent would reveal potential bias; pfctdayelise pointed out that the German Wikipedia had allowed paid editing; David Shankbone said that existing policies take care of conflict of interest issues; LessHeard vanU felt that we all have an inclination toward bias which the shared editing process would hopefully amalgamate to a neutral point of view, and expressed a common view that editors should reveal any potential bias, such as a relationship with the subject, or a financial gain. Thekohser asserted that most experienced paid content editors are likely producing higher-quality, more compliant content than volunteer editors. The majority of those that offered their own opinion statements felt that paid editing was a conflict of interest which should be discouraged or controlled in some way - Jimbo Wales stated that he would block any user selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, and that he considered it policy not to accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia. Some 66 support votes were cast for this view, the highest among any statement criticizing paid editing. FayssalF suggested a template to identify articles which had been edited by paid editors; YellowMonkey gave an example of a known paid article on a businessman which did not contain details of lawsuits for fraud against the businessman; Fred Bauder felt that endorsement of paid advocacy opened the door to influencing Wikipedia content. A proposal on paid editing exists - Wikipedia:Paid editing |
An RFC on the notion of paid editing.
NOTE: As of the launch time of this RFC, this is not a blockable offense under any policy, or to my knowledge against any explicit policy, but dances around WP:COI in some ways. rootology ( C)( T) 18:20, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
REMINDER TO USE THE TALK PAGE FOR DISCUSSION: All signed comments and talk not related to an endorsement should be directed to this page's discussion page. Discussion should be posted on the talk page. Threaded replies to another user's vote, endorsement, evidence, response, or comment should be posted to the talk page.
If you're interested in this discussion, you may be interested in the page under construction at Wikipedia:Paid editing providing advice and warnings to prospective paid editors.
Users should only edit one summary or view, other than to endorse.
Is paid editing a problem? Is it fine? Is it against policy? What policy? What should be the response?
A start toward consensus on what the community view is on the matter of "paid editing".
This issue essentially boils down to three viewpoints, I feel. I've outlined them below. Please keep comments to one sentence or less!
Users involved in paid editing are banned after a yet-to-be-decided number of warnings.
Users involved in paid editing must, for example, disclose their clients, and submit the article for review by neutral editors in good standing. For example, that is - exact caveats to be decided.
Paid editors are allowed to continue paid editing, but must be aware of the CoI etc. Basically how it is at present.
My view on this is pretty basic. I don't care why someone writes free content for us, as long as it's compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N, and all the other associated content policies for inclusion in Wikipedia. Did you write the article because you thought it was interesting as a subject? Because you're a fan of the place/person/business? A patron? An employee? Because they paid you? Once you release and post the content to the encyclopedia, you have no control over it--it's live. Your paying sponsor, if you had one, paid you--not Wikipedia. They have no claim or control over the content we have here. We have a host of policies to deal with content, and editing by users. Does it really matter why they wrote the content, if it's quality? If not, we have the options in-process of WP:Speedy Deletion and WP:Articles for Deletion for content that doesn't qualify. That's all we need. More to the point, if someone does something crazy like pay a person to write a featured article about them, their company, or product, do we care? We get another Featured Article out of the deal.
Speaking as myself, I've written a featured article because I'm a fan and I've met them several times, they're tremendously nice people, and chat with one member periodically; wrote a good article for the same reasons, plus I've had a couple of drinks with the band; have one featured article bubbling in development because I'm a patron and their staff are some of the nicest guys I've ever encountered; two future FAs because I'm a fan of the place and a shopper there, and know at least two individuals in passing involved in various degrees with the administration of the overall facility; and have a nascent project to which I have actually given them money, and have multiple friends who are a part of the orginization. Any one of them could have paid me in theory $100 to write this content--they didn't--but if they had, so what? We'd have more good articles out of the deal.
I am wholly ambivalent about the motivation of why someone writes free content, so long as they do, we get it for free, it's policy-compliant, and they understand and accept (or don't, since their acceptance of policy is irrelevant in the end) they and their client has zero right nor claim of ownership of it from the moment it's posted. The "Why" doesn't matter; only the free content does, and there is nothing about the motivations of why someone writes that has anything to do with our "free culture". That "free culture" thing applies to us giving it away free to our readers, not "you must write it for free".
If someone wrote a stunning and neutral Featured Article on Topic X-Y-Z with 100+ sources, as their sole contribution, and then admitted immediately after it's promotion to FA status that they were paid $500 to do so by the subject so that they would get the massive "Google Juice" or exposure, would we block the author and depromote the article on principle, and run it through WP:AFD? Nonsense, any admin (any admin) doing so on grounds of "paid editing" would be grossly out of bounds. The FA cost us nothing but the time to review it. rootology ( C)( T) 19:19, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Talking about transparency, would you accept placing the below template at the top of the article? -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 07:32, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
This article has been edited by
user:Example in exchange of a fee. |
This article has been edited by one or more paid editors. |
I see no need for this template. Such templates are for pointing out problems with articles. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 09:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment
As Rootology says above, if the community judges it to be good content, then what's the problem? If the community doesn't judge it to be good content, it gets taken care of the way any other article does, and a clueless company has wasted their money. -- SarekOfVulcan ( talk) 19:38, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment:
I think that what you and User:Rootology are missing is that the constitution of this 'community' that judges content will change and therefore so will wikipedia. -- RegentsPark ( My narrowboat) 10:30, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Clearly, paid editing is slanted, biased, and does NOT in fact reflect closely the facts of the matter, or the opinions of the community. Even paid editing, though disclosed, serves the illicit purpose of mutilating the facts, and manipulating the reader(s). Propaganda, no matter how you pretty it up, is exactly that. Propaganda. Let the Fascists continue to have their way, and we will dance to George Bush's (Orwell) drummer ... just do it for the children, think of the children ...
I have always supported paid editing if you can get that work. Unfortunately, in the past the person/people most associated with paid editing are unpleasant and disliked; thus, the issue has been paired with them. It's time to review the idea outside of the past, and ask why our other policies and guidelines will not take care of perceived WP:COI issues. They would. Paid editing happens; only diligent review of material for NPOV, V and OR will circumvent problems with any of our material, paid or unpaid. -->David Shankbone 19:45, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Paid editing leads to paid nutters - you know who I mean - with an inherent POV to push and a monetary reason for pushing it. By all means, commonsense should be applied rather than a blanket ban, but third-party payment for editing of any subject for commercial or POV gains should be sanctionable if proven.
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Even if we did proscribe paid editing, how on earth would we ever prove that it had occurred? Since it is impossible to prove that money has changed hands, and it is highly unlikely that people will admit to paid editing, we need to judge content on the basis of what it says, rather than making guesses about the motivations of the people who contribute it. Tim Vickers ( talk) 19:54, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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As those with long memories may recall me arguing during the MyWikiBiz brouhaha, I think allowing paid editors to edit openly is a net positive. At least part of the material on every band article is written by fans; on every corporate article is written by employees; on every politician article is written by supporters… Yes, a paid editor isn't going to be neutral – but someone openly admitting that they're editing for profit is someone making their prejudice clear. I don't see how, for example, allowing paid editors to write about a corporation is any different in terms of the impact on Wikipedia than, for instance allowing a user who identifies as a gay-rights advocate on their userpage to edit sexuality-related articles, or an active church member to edit religious articles. Ten thousand active editors hopefully provides a bulwark against bias.
Besides, I would far rather have users able unambiguously to edit with their potential bias in the opening, than the current poor compromise, in which editors feel the need actively to hide their particular points of view. And everyone in the world has a point of view on any subject they're likely to care enough about to write an article. As long as we have people willing to keep an eye on their edits to make sure they don't step over the line into advertising, we should give an amnesty to all the existing "paid editor" blocks – yes Greg, even you – and start again with a clean slate. – iride scent 19:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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comment
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who has an ulterior motivation in contributing should note their interest on their userpage - be it editing for financial gain, a relationship with the subject, or other factor potentially effecting their bias. As regards bias, it is recognised that we all have one and it is by the amalgamating of differing bias' that we hope to achieve NPOV; being a paid editor should only be an extension of that consideration, among others also disposed toward a certain viewpoint.
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Comment
It's simple, really: paid editing automatically creates a COI. A known COI does not prevent editing but greatly reduces the requirement to assume good faith for any edits that have an appearance of non-neutrality.
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Comment. This is a huge leap in reasoning that requires some extraordinary support, in my opinion. It seems to me that this is a large motivating reason for "taking action" against paid editing, but simply stating this as a reason does not make it true. Ω ( talk) 08:14, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Paid editing is like editing without a username (an IP edit) - it should not be banned, but it is a red flag. Who is paying is more important than who is being paid - what are they expecting for their money? WAS 4.250 ( talk) 20:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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I largely agree with Rootology's points above, at least as far as the end product is concerned. If an article can go through the review processes and become featured, in the end it doesn't matter what the motivations were of the person who wrote it -- whether out of nationalist pride, personal fulfillment, a vendetta, or the prospect of income.
However, I think paid editing should only be allowed under certain conditions because of its impact on the process of developing an article (or otherwise influencing WP content):
Such disclosure would be mandatory but enforced via the honor system. It's pretty much impossible to prove that someone was paid for their edits unless they admit it themselves at some point -- so the aim of these rules is not to catch underhanded behavior, but to provide a standard way for good-faith editors to regulate their edits and to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish on behalf of their client and how they will respect WP policies in doing so. Clarity upfront should help avoid suspicions and misunderstandings down the road.
If someone is found to be editing for pay and they haven't followed these rules (and knew or should have known about them), they would be subject to trouting or other sanctions depending on the egregiousness of the behavior.
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Anyone who edits for pay has a conflict of interest and should follow WP:COI. That guideline calls on editors with a COI to declare their conflict and to only edit the article talk pages, not the article text. If they do so then there is no problem with being paid. Will Beback talk 20:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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If a paid editor is going to be editing, they should be following the PRSA code of ethics, located at [1], specifically the parts about avoiding deceptive practices and revealing the sponsors for causes and interests represented.
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I don't find paid editing inherently problematic. As Rootology mentions above, if paid editing results in content that meets our guidelines, we gain from it. I do think that explicitly allowing paid editing would open a Pandora's box of issues, though. The question of paid editing concerns not only the content produced but the methods used. For an obvious example, what happens when a paid editor participates in an AfD on his paid content?
We can't look just at content, but must also consider behaviour. If we allow paid editing, we implicitly allow the promotional advocacy that will come with it, that will use rules-lawyering and our own openness to attempt to push a particular version of "the Truth™" on us. While I'm confident that we know how to deal with spam, can we—and more importantly, would we—deal appropriately with behaviour that's promotional as well as content that's promotional? In the longer term, would the paid contributors burn out any of the volunteers? Would the advocacy result in arbitration cases and corrosive, endless disputes? Would it be detrimental to the health of the community?
The easy counter-argument that people can currently do paid editing without disclosure is not relevant: paid editing that can hide well enough that it isn't noticed isn't a huge problem, and people will always be able to edit under the radar as long as we have effective anonymity or pseudonymity. I see the problem not so much in paid editing itself but in the endorsement of paid editing (through any explicit allowance for paid editing). Wikipedia always needs to make a strong stand for its neutrality, and such an endorsement of advocacy is dangerous to that cause.
I don't mean to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt: if there are solid answers to the questions I ask, I'm willing to support paid editing. As a user experienced with Wikipedia, I might even stand to gain from it—I've already been offered the opportunity more than once (but politely declined each time). What I emphasize is not so much evils inherent in paid editing but dangers associated with them. {{ Nihiltres| talk| edits}} 21:40, 9 June 2009 (UTC), modified slightly at 22:13, 9 June 2009 (UTC), with a slight phrasing update at 04:32, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comments
We need a best practices policy/guideline, so that we can separate the good from the bad versus just tossing all paid editing into the DONTWANTIT bin. Some paid editing is good, such as when you can't distinguish between it and everything else here. Some paid editing isn't, such as when you can't distinguish between it and a press release. WP should make it clear what the rights/responsibilities are of both the editors and the clients that pay them.
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Paid editing is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Neither academia nor journalism are going to accept the argument that "everyone has biases ergo financially induced bias isn't an issue either". While it is true that paid editing can be very hard (if not impossible) to police, unless wikipedia does (and is seen to do) its utmost to be vigilant against such activities and bars them unambiguously, the project's credibility will suffer. Imperfect enforceability should not limit our ideals, else we may as well discard NPOV as an unachievable and naive goal too.
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Comments
I personally feel this is one of those things is best to take an "I can't see you" approach to. Some paid editors are decent editors trying to earn their way. If you're a long time Wikipedia contributor and get offered cash for doing what you enjoy, fair enough. Other paid editors aren't good editors, write poor articles and lower the 'pedia's standards. They should be treated like anyone else.
In my view, we should ignore whether people are paid or not. That's their business and not ours. The only thing that's important is whether they're adhering to our policy and creating good content. A featured article is a featured article, whether the author was paid or not. Similarly, vandalism is just that, whether the author was pushed to do so or not. Paid editors should be treated no differently to anyone else, and their status as such should plainly be ignored. Greg Tyler ( t • c) 21:53, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia welcomes positive contributions from anyone regardless of their personal motivations. However, experience has shown that when an editor's primary motivation is to promote a given organisation or cause, that editor is more likely to cause harm to the project. A glance through the arbitration logs confirms this. Widespread editing for financial gain can be expected to lead to problems such as single-purpose accounts, POV-pushing, edit-warring, and other policy violations, just as the motivations of religious fervor and nationalist pride have done so often in the past. Such ulterior motivations are difficult to square with our primary objective of building a neutral encyclopedia. The acceptance or legitimization of paid editing is likely to lead, in practice, to acceptance and legitimization of behavior that harms Wikipedia.
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Comment: The logical outcome of your argument is that we also ban nationalists and the religiously fervent. Like you say, they cause the same problems as paid editors would. -- Helenalex ( talk) 09:56, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
If you write an article on Wikipedia, your only concern should be to improve the encyclopedia. If you're getting any real world benefit from an article appearing a certain way (or appearing at all), then your interests are divided between WP and "something else". This is a COI any way you look at it.
Yes, paid editing happens more often than we are likely happy to admit. However, I would hazard a guess that Souckpuppetry also happens more often than we'd like. I don't think we should adjust our principles as a result though. We may not be able to stop either, but we can react when we discover them. Arakunem Talk 01:05, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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If a person edits a Wikipedia article, they are almost prime facie "interested" in the topic. (Some edits, like reversion of vandalism, may constitute exceptions to this generalization.) At the most general level, I believe an editor's interest derives from a simple desire to help others learn what one has learned oneself. But "what one has learned" is a grey area.
In mathematics, what an editor adds may be simple factual knowledge. But in other topic areas, an editor may have developed a more subjective view. When one gets into areas like same-sex marriage or assisted suicide or pedophilia, just to name a few random examples, it is simply impossible to write in a way that doesn't betray a certain point of view; every term one can use carries some cultural baggage, and some pre-packaged assumptions.
Such articles often become very good, when editors of differing points of view enter into good faith discussions, and find a way to incorporate both (or multiple) points of view into the article, permitting the reader to make his or her own judgments.
The idea of a "conflict of interest" is an attempt to draw a clear line where the reality is shades of grey. All Wikipedia editing is done by contributors who have an interest in the subject at hand. Drawing a clean line at paid editing is an ill-fated attempt to find a simple solution to a complex situation.
At the core, no policy or guideline can resolve such shades of grey; rather, the solution lies in the quality of our editors, and their ability to discuss topics from a framework outside their own personal views. This has been shown to work on some articles, but as a community, we still have some growing to do, and there are always more editors to help grow into this style of collaboration.
So, I oppose having any firm prohibition on paid editing. However, we must remain concerned about paid editing; I'm not advising we stick our heads in the sand.
I believe the solution lies in encouraging transparency, as WP:COI suggests. Editors who are closely connected to an article -- whether through payment, close personal associations, emotional attachment, or other ways -- should be encouraged to disclose this fact; and if they are regular contributors, they should find ways to do so (maybe repeatedly) so that other regular contributors are genuinely made aware of the conflict. Also, the principle that individuals, not organizations, have Wikipedia accounts is an important one to enforce.
There is one thing I strongly believe we should reconsider, which is this: currently, when making a new account, an editor is greeted with the following text:
I believe this should be rewritten. Certainly, some words of guidance are appropriate, as the choice of a username can have lasting implications. However, the way it is currently worded sets new editors off on a path that discourages individual accountability; it almost assumes that an editor will be making edits that he or she would not want attached to his/her name. This does not set the right tone for the kind of collegial environment that we should be striving to maintain.
- Pete ( talk) 01:45, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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'Comment I don't think anyone is claiming that the only unacceptable COIs are involved with paid editing. The issue is that paid editing the vast majority of the time will be too much of a COI. JoshuaZ ( talk) 00:17, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment. Anonymity is evil. Transparency is good. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 16:57, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
The problem with paid editing is that it opens the door to professional public relations firms being paid to craft and monitor Wikipedia articles for their clients. A firm or individual being paid $100,000 or more annually to ensure favorable treatment for their client in the media can significantly impact the content of a Wikipedia article. Now, such public relations operatives are forced to sneak around and run the risk of exposure and embarrassment to their clients. Endorsement of paid advocacy editing opens the door to massive influence on Wikipedia content by those interests who are able to afford professional public relations work of this nature.
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Comment
Any form of acceptance of 'paid editing' on wikipedia should be actively discouraged. The reasons for this are:
Unfortunately, money is the ultimate killer of any voluntary enterprise. There is nothing worse than the cheated feeling you get when you discover what other people are making for the same amount of work, there is nothing as attractive as getting paid for what you are good at, and there is nothing less reliable than the paid press releases put out by corporations, government bodies, individuals, just anybody.
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Disagree. Counter to point 1: 99% of people today edit Wikipedia for fun, this will not change. People don't care that some people are being professional gamers or players and are making $$$, they still play games/sports. NBA doesn't mean that fewer people are playing basketball. Counter to point 2: "Why would User:X slave away half the nights editing Arab-Norman culture for nothing?" Because he enjoys doing so, and can apparently make good living without editing Wikipedia for $. Not everyone is driven by $, so not everyone will switch to paid articles. And what about the possibility of non-profit organizations offering $ to have people write articles on, let's say, Arab-Norman culture? Counter to point 3: paid editing is just one of many POVs. Personally I worry more about religious fanatics and secret government agents then PR firms. Money just has a bad rep in some leftist fora :) -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:26, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
No.
-- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 05:11, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment (I have placed this comment also at Jimbo's Statement - where it has high visibility - but it was originally going to be placed here. I am doing so because I believe I am going to get a more considered response than someone who references a predilection to sanction without recourse anyone who may take a different view.) Right at the top of the masthead, it says that Wikipedia is the "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (my italics); the "free" bit is regarding the content to the reader, but the "anyone" makes no determination on what categories of potential contributor may or may not be included - my understanding is that 'anyone' means universal acceptance. Our licenses do not require that content is provided free, even though it is noted in the editing window that it may be used by third parties for financial reward. If Jimbo is correct then we need to clarify what we mean by "anyone", and amend our flagship statement of intent accordingly. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:35, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
I think paid editing would be a problem. First of all, if paid editing was in the project rather than free editing, there would be lots of committment issues within. Why? Some editor would be saying and thinking things like "why ain't I getting paid for helping", "if you don't pay me, I'll leave", "if I don't receive compensation for my edits, I will file a lawsuit", "oh, I get paid, this is the perfect job for me", "if you don't give me ${number} or more, I'll leave", and "I want money". Paid editing would destroy an editors abbility to be true and loyal to the project, and instead, they would only be loyal to themselves.
We don't get paid for our contributions to Wikipedia, and the lack of payment actually benefits us, because the editors as of now are true to the project, and are not like "give me money, give me money, give me money". If you're only here for money, you don't belong here, and should be kicked out to the farthest distance possible. Editors who are really here to help and not for money are the editors that belong here. They aren't here so they can gain an extra dollar, they're here so they can help make the encyclopedia better, which is why we are here.
To a certain extent, we editors do get something in return already. 1) The enjoyment of editing and 2) Our learning from other articles as a result of the writing of other editors.
It's not like the project tells you "if you help Wikipedia, we'll pay you this cash". It doesn't and shouldn't go that way. Instead, it goes "your help to this project would be appreciated by many readers, and your help and commitment will be accepted".
Why should I be paid for any edit I have made? Why should I be here for the cash and not the commitment to help? Why should anybody be paid? Why should Wikipedia pay you?
With that said, paid editing would destroy the integrity, purpose, commitment, hopefulness, and everything it possibly can, and will not help us in any way, period.
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A point that hasn't been brought up and is worth mentioning:
We should probably distinguish users who are paid to edit, but disclose the fact and edit honestly (in the wiki sense) from those who try to promote by the back door - spurious links, mentions in other articles, "not here to write an encyclopedia", etc.
A code for commercial or paid editors, or those with a personal interest in the topic, would be a good idea. We'd still get abuse from those who would mis-edit anyway, but my sense is that as of 2009, a lot of the wider PR and business world recognizes the PR disaster of "we edited our own Wikipedia article" and if given a policy to follow, they would do so. In brief, subject to consensus on a suitable policy, there is possibly no need to tar all such editors with the same brush.
A possible outline of such a policy is at User:FT2/Commercial and paid editing to give some idea of the requirements we might make for a genuine commercial editor.
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I wrote this explanation in reply to a comment here (+ some minor edits):
For those who hear "paid editing" and think "MyWikiBiz debacle" or "Microsoft stooges", I would like you to keep in mind other projects like LINGUIST List paying an intern to improve linguistics articles (see also User:Linguistlist). The Germany government has also paid to improve German Wikipedia articles in particular areas, see German_Wikipedia#Subsidies_from_the_German_government. Paid editing need not only be a force for evil!
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Comment
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Comment as an admin: disagree. It would be a discrimination against admins and crats. Of course, if an admin/crat abuses their tools / breaks policy "for profit", he should be desysoped immediately. But good faith should be assumed towards them just as towards other editors. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:36, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Conflict of interest editing is strongly discouraged because it is incompatible with the aim of producing a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia. In particular, an editor who receives a payment for their work is known to have a conflict of interest, and is strongly advised to comply with the relevant guideline by declaring their interest on their user page and on the talk page of any article they edit. In addition, such editors should restrict their comments in the articles for deletion process to brief statements of fact, for example by providing a reference regarding a disputed assertion. Only editors with no conflict of interest should debate whether an article is to be retained or deleted or merged.
Establishing whether a particular editor has a conflict of interest may not be possible, or even necessary. What counts is whether the editor displays a pattern of appearing to promote individuals or organizations. Such behavior is incompatible with the aim of producing a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia.
The community should deal with editors who may have a conflict of interest in a prompt fashion. If a pattern of promoting individuals or organizations is suspected, the editor should be restricted from creating any further articles or redirects other than those pre-approved by a mentor. Johnuniq ( talk) 08:39, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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A positive argument:
So far most of the pro-paid editing arguments have essentially been 'it won't be any worse than some of the stuff we get already' and 'we can't stop it so we should encourage people to be honest'. While these are both good arguments, I think paid editing could actually benefit Wikipedia.
The first point is that the number of articles affected would probably be fairly small. Corporations will pay for their articles, cities, countries etc will pay people to keep an eye on their pages and try and remove unduly negative material, agents will hire people to work on their clients' pages (musicians, actors etc) and political parties will be very interested. But generally speaking no one is going to pay money for someone to edit a page on a species of tree, or a dead composer, or a movie that came out in the 1960s or any one of thousands of other topics. Earlier this year I investigated setting up an editing business but decided against it when I realised that the number of pages which anyone had a financial interest in is actually pretty small. So Wikipedia will not be engulfed in a horde of PR people messing with every article. They will edit a limited number of articles, almost entirely in areas like politics and current events which tend to need close policing anyway. I think the strongest affected area would be politics, but since all parties would end up hiring editors, they would hopefully cancel each other out. For example if a Republican-paid editor put a puff-piece article up, a Democratic-paid editor would be in there to un-puff it. This is not really an argument in favour of editing, just that the impact would be far less than most people would think.
There seems to be an assumption that paid editors will inevitably behave badly. People are forgetting that paid editors would have a major financial interest in not being blocked, not having their every edit reverted, and not having the entire community distrust and dislike them. This would far outweigh the financial benefit of giving into a client who insists that their page have no negative material on it. In short, paid editors could not afford to piss people off, and would therefore be more conscientious than the average editor about abiding by policy, giving way to community consensus etc.
The majority of paid editing we know about is done by PR hacks who have no idea how Wikipedia works. Consequently their edits are awful. Enabling people who know what they're doing to offer their services will stop these people from trying to do something they don't know how to do - why would they when they can hire a professional who does? So rather than increasing the amount of PR fluff and so forth, this could actually reduce it as the clueless are replaced by the experienced.
Currently people who choose to edit for money are encouraged to be secretive about what they are doing. The current policy does not prevent paid editing, it simply drives it underground. Encouraging people to be honest about what they are up to means bias will be easier to spot and deal with. Plenty of biased editing looks fine at first glance; if we know that an editor has been paid and by who we can look a bit more closely and see whether we can trust them or not. Basically it would mean that paid editors would be scrutinised more than the average user, who may well be biased through personal prejudice, political or religous beliefs, nationality etc.
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When it comes to reliability, Wikipedia already has a poor reputation as it is, and this would only further harm its public image. Paid editing is something that Wikipedia should neither encourage nor condone.
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Some things are not policy simply because it's never been necessary to make it policy. It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. There are of course some possibly interesting alternatives, not particularly relevant here, but the idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now.
I think the opening statement on this page is a red herring. Would we block a good editor if we found out after the fact is a very different question. We have traditions of forgiveness and working with people to improve their behavior and ours whenever we can - things are never so simple. Of course it is possible to imagine a situation where someone can and should be forgiven... because that's very common.
That's not the same as saying that it would ever be ok, as a matter of policy. Just imagine the disaster for our reputation. Are we free and independent scribes doing our best to record all human knowledge? Or are we paid shills. I know what I choose.
Now, could it be perfectly fine for someone to set up an independent writing service for GFDL / CC BY / CC BY-SA content, to be posted somewhere else, and for completely independent wikipedians to find it useful in some way? Of course. But that's very different from setting up shop to sell one's services as an advocate editing articles? We have ways for advocates to participate in Wikipedia - the talk page serves perfectly well for this.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 15:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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“ | It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. | ” |
I hope the community takes away Jimbo's admin bit (as absurd as it would be) for abusing his admin tools, should he continue his practice of banning paid editors. Founder or not. It's pretty clear from his comments here that he cares more about image than the quality of the Wiki. -- Ned Scott 06:23, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
For the record, I explained to Jimbo four days ago on functionaries-en@wikimedia.org that I have also done "paid editing", and have not hidden this fact. Jimmy is right to say that we should not clump all "paid editing" together, but he is very wrong to write policy on a whim and threaten that he will block anyone who sells their services as an "editor", which equates to any form of "paid editing". FWIW, many of the instances of paid editing that I have seen are fundamentally wrong, however as illustrated at #Statement by pfctdayelise, there are many fantastic collaborations that involve money or in-kind. We should not be silly about this, and put our head in the sand. This is complex. We need to be open and honest about our editing, discuss the pros and cons, and it is not helpful to have threats of blocks hanging over our heads. If the community decides that I shouldn't create content at work, I will comply, and I expect others will as well. But I will not seek forgiveness from Jimbo, who has benefited from my efforts, or anyone for that matter. John Vandenberg ( chat) 11:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment The conflict of interest introduced by paid editors is greater than it is for other COIs, such as fans writing for bands, advocates writing for causes they believe in, etc. A fan whose peacock prose got cut or modified would probably be willing to concede the point eventually, but someone whose paycheck, perhaps even livelihood, depends on them getting something onto WP would not be so accommodating. The paid editor is not working for WP; they're working for Company X, so they have nothing to lose by trying to get their POV on here however they can. Also, pardon my French, but the idea of admins or crats being paid to sway policy here makes me fucking sick. Matt Deres ( talk) 23:10, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment Jimbo no longer has the power to make or break policy. It was by his unilateral decree that speedy deletion criterion T1 was created 3 years ago. It was later repealed by community consensus. He is respected for his vision, and as the face of Wikipedia, but as he himself has so often said, it is not he who builds or runs Wikipedia, nor is he any more capable of predicting the most effective policy to instate. Our policy must be written as our articles are, and as the laws of every democratic nation are: by the consent of the people. Dcoetzee 07:18, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment: The German Chapter Wikimedia in Deutschland e.V. is cooperating with the state and a private institute. The projects' theme is writing articles about Renewable resources. The chapter spent 17,663 Euro for salaried personnel concerning this project from the budget of 2008. It is job-creation measure financed from the general donations. -- Simplicius ( talk) 11:39, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Disagreee This would be a radical, and I fear unenforceable change to WP:COI. Personally I would be quite happy if it became normal in Hollywood and Bollywood to pay their publicists to release low resolution photos and artwork stills of actors and fictional characters to Wikipedia, providing someone had already created an article about them. However I would much prefer that this was done transparently and publicly. As for other paid editing I don't see that we have the tools to ban it and therefore would much prefer that we set rules such as at wp:COI rather than attempt prohibition without the means to enforce that prohibition. At present when I suspect paid editing is going on I'm quite happy to refer people to wp:COI. I'm not sure how one would handle suspicions of paid editing if we had a complete prohibition, but I suspect we would all tend to be a bit more cautious before accusing newbies of something blockable - hence my fear that this would be another example where prohibiting a human behaviour increases rather than reduces it. Ϣere SpielChequers 13:54, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment as some users have said above, I think we need a separate request for comment to determine, once and for all, whether Jimbo - who, I'm sure we all love and respect dearly - can set down legislation on his own. I'm not sure I have strong feelings either way: on the one hand I am rather anti-authoritarian and democratic. On the other, on a more human level, I realise I'd feel a bit pissed if a community I virtually created and nurtured took me out of the loop. In theory, if Jimbo DOES say he can legislate alone, then the RFC kinda fails no matter what anyone else says on the subject. I feel this might be something we have to work out, just so we know. -- bodnotbod ( talk) 19:19, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Personally, I feel that editing with a COI is a much bigger issue than rootology makes it out as. For starters, rootology claims that every paid editor is either a "good" editor or a "bad" editor, and is recognizeable as such on sight. This ignores subtle POV-pushing. For a current example, see [5] [which apparently was noticed by someone else too, see above], which alleges that outright lies have been introduced to ODF (I have not investigated both sides of the issue; however, if POV pushing similar to that described by this article was going on, I don't think we would notice based solely on the contributions). A COI is a very serious issue; we cannot compromise on this. A paid user may be "bad" but also very subtle. A sufficiently subtle user might be misinterpreted, even deliberately so, as helping the community (or trying to) when in fact he is hurting it. We need a solid policy against this type of thing. I propose considering all paid accounts to be role accounts, since their motivations are extremely similar, and in fact there may not be much difference between them. It seems to me that:
-- Thin boy 00 @903, i.e. 20:40, 10 June 2009 (UTC) Additions in square brackets.
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I enjoy Wikipedia, and I had never thought about being paid until a few weeks ago when I saw a request for a freelance writer on an email list and offered some of the Wikipedia articles I had been mostly responsible for as samples. The businessperson replied that she had tried to write an article about a clearly unique product that she sells, but that the article had been speedy deleted. I did a quick search and found several reliable and verifiable sources that would have allowed me to create a DYK-eligible article in under a half hour. I thought of offering to write such an article in exchange for my services, but declined to even make the offer as it would irrevocably tarnish my amateur standing, and I always wanted to be able to compete internationally if they ever made Wikipedia an Olympic sport.
When I saw this RfC, I assumed that I would be against paid editing. Until I saw Jimbo's remarks. While I appreciate the lofty goals that have been set, so many of them end up being imposed at the expense of the most committed editors. Despite all of the bots, and all of the folks on Huggle, Twinkle and other tools, I am one of many editors who spends hours each day trying to keep out the crap, poop and other shit from vandals, who are invited in with no barrier to entry in the name of having an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit". While I put in my time as an amateur, nothing prevents Jimbo Wales from trading off all of the effort put in by unpaid labor ($3 billion worth, per his article) to receive fees and expenses for his speaking engagements around the globe in which he talks about how wonderful all the volunteers at Wikipedia are. While paid editors may create problems that tarnish our reputation, we seem to do a great job of embarrassing ourselves, up to the ArbCom level, without a penny trading hands.
I couldn't help but be reminded of all the talented amateur athletes at notable American colleges and universities who play football or basketball, working their asses off in training, practices and on the field/court. Their schools bring in tens of millions of dollars each year, their coaches are paid millions and the athletes are paid zero (don't worry, I haven't forgotten about scholarships). If any player received a dollar for their hard labor, their school is obligated to toss them off the team. The NCAA seems to spend inordinate amounts of money and effort tracking down those disgraceful violators who seek a few dollars to cover their bills and ensure that the financial purity of the sport is maintained. And we volunteers at Wikipedia don't even get the scholarships that are purported to be the tradeoff. Remember that brainiacs get colleg scholarships without forced labor involved.
Let's pick one or the other. If we can't make money off Wikipedia, let's make sure that no one does. If it is okay for some to trade off their Wikipedia involvement, let's set up a mechanism under which some of the editors who contribute massive amounts of time and effort can have the opportunity to earn a few bucks for their labors.
My suggestion would be to have an equivalent of a "paid articles for creation". A company, organization or individual would submit a request for a new article, detailing why it's notable and providing whatever material they have on their own. As long as there is a whiff of basic notability, existing editors would then bid for the right to create the article. The winning bidder would create the article, which would have to pass muster of both the entity that wanted the article and some board that would verify that the article meets Wikipedia notability and POV standards. Everything is on the up-and-up, there is no direct connection between bidder and author and we can have a win-win situation; editors can earn some money and someone can get an article created that no one qualified to create the article would have an interest in creating.
At last we peons would be able to earn a small fraction of what Jimbo earns from Wikipedia and I would be able to tell my wife that the time I spend on Wikipedia is bringing in some income.
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If I had wanted to worry who could benefit from my work or whether I'd get paid, I wouldn't have licensed it GFDL or contribute to an encyclopedia that mandatorily does so. When I edit, I do so aware that I'm volunteering free content that can be used by anyone in the world. When I am told that someone might take the content I added, and re-use it in a way that somehow makes them money, that's fine - it's free for commercial use too. I expect it, and I don't begrudge it. My focus is on the content anyone can use, not green-eyed envy at who might be benefiting from it "out there" whether Jimbo, a student, some web entrepreneur, whatever.
Frankly, if Jimbo has moved on in his other projects and found that his standing due to Wikipedia enables him to make an honest income elsewhere... or Veropedia can reuse and polish our better articles and wants to use them with advertizing for profit... or some unknown finds a whole new way to profit from them... frankly I care more whether the next edit I write will be an improvement to free knowledge. That is what the "free" in "free knowledge" is about. FT2 ( Talk | email) 01:04, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Paying to have articles written (presumably favorable ones) is antithetical to the original premise of Wikipedia. Perhaps somewhere a "paypedia" will eventually be created, but this is not the project to try the experiment on. We already have significant problems with people pushing points of view because of personal beliefs, allowing overt payments for articles would be an order of magnitude more of a problem, especially where competing interests might pay for conflicting articles. Collect ( talk) 23:06, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
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Some of the above comments above say that editing for pay is fine as long as NPOV, V etc are followed. Well, in the case of a businessman who hires a person to look after/write a Wikipedia article for them with a narrow objective, the chances of NPOV are pretty negligible.
Would a businessman pay for an article if it was not promotional? If it contained information about the lawsuits against the businessman in question?
I googled up the subject of a hired pay-article (a businessman) written by User:Zithan (as discussed on Jimbo's talk page) and I found that he was the subject of law suits for a variety of frauds, racism and so forth. He was also a business partner with a person who was sanctioned by a watchdog for improper business practices/scams and criticised by a leading finance pundit and author in a mainstream newspaper for being dodgy. I can email the links to people because the article's subject does have a tendency to sue people who criticise his business practices.
Needless to say, this was not in the pay-article, and I have no doubt the client/subject would not have paid up if it was. Which is why believing that paid editing on specific orders of people who want an article about themselves can be NPOV is pretty naive. After all, which businessman has not made a mistake, not to mention those who willfully engage in dubious business practices and want misleadingly glowing profiles of themselves on Wikipedia? YellowMonkey ( cricket calendar poll!) 02:14, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comments
The disadvantages far exceed the advantages.
Once it's endorsed, it's to officially open the door for interest groups and tell them they're welcome. It will slowly and gradually have as result to filtrate Wikipedia when the non-paid editors will be driven out and be replaced by the paid ones.
MyWikiBiz is MyWikiBiz, everyone is free to build his own paid Wiki. If it's working elsewhere and good articles are built elsewhere, the material can be brought here, no need for any form of endorsement. It can't be prevented since it's probable that many are already paid to edit, but at least the naive editor who is not paid is encouraged into believing that others like him who contribute are doing it solely in the spirit of building an encyclopedia. It's so demoralising for the unpaid editor to know that another is being paid for the same amount of energy he puts on the project without any sort of monetary gain. It's inevitable that this same editor will either leave the project or turn to paid editing, thus leaving the subjects dear to him and migrating where there is some monetary advantage in editing.
The German government had good intentions but the government should have opened its own Wiki. If that Wiki could have anything relevant it could have been brought here.
Wikipedia has already many fatal problems, the last thing we need is an endorsement to a motto which says: The encyclopedia is where the money is. - Fedayee ( talk) 17:03, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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1. Organizations that share our educational mission: If people are scared about "paid editors," remember that a lot of them will be employees at "public interest" organizations (nonprofits/governments/schools), which earn their budgets by convincing donors/taxpayers/tuitioners that they are achieving their missions of "educating the public on [topic X-Y-Z]." Currently, these organizations (and Wikipedia) waste huge amounts of time in accomplishing this common mission. First, the organizations hire employees to publish this info at their websites (e.g. www.epic.org, www.commerce.gov, etc). Then a Wikipedian has to find these resources in a Google search, and mention it among an article's "external links". Then the information slowly creeps into the article by osmosis. If we could convince these organizations to perform their educational mission directly on Wikipedia, then they (and we) can better accomplish that mission. (To make my point more concrete: I happen to be a government employee who sneaks in occasional edits (on my areas of expertise) while at work. Imagine how much better Wikipedia would be if my boss ENCOURAGED this as part of our bureau's mission!)
2. The Credit Motive: If the nonprofit chooses to surrender this web traffic to Wikipedia, it will want to make it up somehow. These paid editors aren't going to want to HIDE their affiliations; they will want to DECLARE it. If Wikipedia is to reap this huge benefit, we should accommodate the credit-motive, not quarantine it. For example, there should be a space on the talk-pages to accommodate these shout-outs: "This article on the history of anti-semitism in Europe was extensively edited by the Anti-Defamation League." "This article on housing discrimination has been adopted by the New Jersey Attorney General." This may require a structural change -- e.g. special accounts for individuals who are performing their edits as part of their employment. Agradman ( talk) 18:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Using Agradman's example, the logical conclusion of paid editing and the incumbent full disclosure will be statements on the article and/or talk pages such as:
I acknowledge that this is a bit over the top, but not by much when you start to think about it. Priyanath talk 21:24, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Openly endorsing paid creation and editing of Wikipedia content would make Wikipedia look foolish, because it would be foolish. It is already policy that Wikipedia is
not a soapbox for advertising or self-promotion. Therefore, is it not an outlet for paid promotional writing. Endorsing paid the editing of Wikipedia by paid advocates would be authorizing
COI on steroids and would undermine the
pillar of
neutrality.
Finell
(Talk) 21:14, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia:REQUEST already exists.
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Addition of paid-for new content (new articles, or expansions of existing articles) where that content is wholly compliant with all "content" policies (WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, WP:N, etc.) is not a bad thing, in particular when that is disclosed as what it is, and the user(s) who add that content adhere at all times to community-endorsed policies relevant to the addition of content to Wikipedia.
Paid-for advocacy--either to retain content at venues such as WP:AFD, modify content in any way contrary to content policies (WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, WP:N, etc.); or to "purchase" the aid of Editors, Administrators, or any other higher-level Wikipedia users to do the same is completely wrong, against policy, and any users who participate in such actions should be banned.
In short, "adding" new paid policy-compliant content is not bad, but paid advocacy of any sort beyond that is very bad.
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Comment
I’d like to draw your attention to this version of the Ashlar-Vellum article (a CAD program). Note the Wikipedia is not your Website thread on its talk page, where an editor wrote I tagged this article for a number of violations, but mainly for consisting of advertising and press-release material. As far as I can tell, due to my knowledge of what was going on with Ashlar at the time, the editor User:Yu.yutik, was “close” with the Ashlar company and this resulted in the “brochure” nature of the article and the need for a bunch of work by the rest of the community to make the article objective.
The statement by Rootology I don't care why someone writes free content for us, as long as it's compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N sounds pragmatic from a point of view of the objective, but I don’t think it is a realistic measure of what will really happen. There is a reason why most major democracies don’t have the judge in a trial act also as the prosecutor. If the “judge” (the Wikipedian responsible for ensuring an article is fair, neutral, and balanced) is the same person as the “prosecutor” (someone being paid by someone who hopes to advance an agenda for financial gain), bias will be an inherent and chronic problem.
I would say that if Wikipedia were to ever allow (or experiment with allowing) content to be posted that was written by editors paid to write the content, that they be required to A) register, and B) have a “(PAID AUTHOR)” suffix at the end of their user name, such as Greg L (PAID AUTHOR) (which I am not, by the way). This way, the community can more easily audit the work product of these authors and have two eyes open as to what we are getting into. Signed: Greg L ( talk) 00:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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WP:OtherMzoli'sExist, or why it doesn't matter where donated content ultimately comes from.
Continuing with what Greg L. writes (and noting that I have no horse in this race and am not likely to be paid by anybody to write anything for Wikipedia) I think it’s worth emphasizing that the legal system DOES work on the basis of material contributed largely by paid advocates. The reason it can DO this is, that the judges and juries aren’t bribed. With WP, it hardly matters where the raw content comes from, so long as other editors are free to pound it into some kind of “fair and reasonable” shape, later. To that view, it’s far less damaging for WP to have some company pay somebody to contribute raw material (paid writing), than it is for WP to allow some company to pay somebody to WP:OWN an article and continue to push a POV after the sourced material and images have been initially put in (paid editing and promo).For an example of the last, which we don’t want, see the great Scientology fiasco. The problem there was, we didn’t have any “statement of COI” by the Scientology advocates, or in the articles. YET, for an example of an industry where such statements work reasonably well, see the US pharmaceutical industry, which contributes more money for basic biomedical research than the US government does. How do the journals keep up with the flood of COI writing, of which there is a great deal? By making sure there is no COI final-editing, and that all writers self-identify that they’re being paid pharma money. In the end, the truth comes out in later publishing, and bad and non-working drugs are identified anyway.
So why do medical journals put up with all of this? Because of the shear amount of content that isn’t available any other way. A great many corporations and foundations have a LOT of inside-information, and also inside-images (copyrighted images are even more important), which they would never be interested in putting on Commons if they thought that their contributions would be immediately deleted, the moment somebody found out it was contributed by somebody with a COI. But so long as information isn’t BLP info (a whole area I personally think WP should stay away from, due to the potential COI problems due to money, sex, power, you name it), then I think all this can be dealt with.
A last example of this is useful, as one which was as bad as if it HAD been a paid-advertisement article: Once upon a time, some high Wikipedian had dinner at Mzoli's Meat in Capetown, South Africa, and liked it, and created a stub on the butcher/restaurant, sort of in the style of Andrew Zimmern or Anthony Bourdain. It went immediately for speedy-delete under WP:NOTTRAVEL, but survived mainly because of who had started the stub. Editors scrambled to find ways it should be notable. After a while, the place was starting to sound like the diamond of upper-class black South African networking. Finally, it settled down to being a pretty good article, of the sort you might want to read if you were in the area looking for a place to eat, and wanted to ignore NOTTRAVEL (you may have noticed that most of the things in WP:NOT actually are about stuff that WP:IS). So in the end, it didn’t matter. Even though the Mzoli’s probably should have been deleted under WP's own policies, so long as WP was forced to keep it by editors who thought they owed it to the project to FIND reasons to keep it, it came out okay ANYWAY, ala WP:IAR. And the same will happen to articles written and illustrated by corporations and businesses too, so long as (at some point) their influence ends, and their initial input is declared, and labeled. As well as the copyrighted images they provide. That’s the way it happens in the “real world,” from journalism to law to politics to medicine to science. Initial material is provided only by the biased, and is fixed up later. Wikipedia is kidding itself if it thinks it’s going to get much better than that. S B H arris 05:01, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What a lot of statements! A suggestion for how to frame future discussion:
Should we:
In the first two cases, should we:
Fwiw, I think we should do 1) and 1). Possibly we could even have a process for removing the template when an article has been thoroughly reviewed and "de-biased". There *is* a difference between a big article written from scratch by a paid editor, and one written by a volunteer, and I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that.
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Comment: I don't agree that we should do #1, so I cannot endorse your statement, but I do agree with how we should frame future discussion. Personally, I think that we should do #4. hmwith τ 17:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Why the song and dance?
Let's look at the tangled web:
Possible improvements: Focus on the product. Consider establishing a COI/POV task force of both admins and non-admins, including technical experts and BAG, answerable to ArbCom, that offers specialised training to volunteers, identifies problem areas and articles, and monitors possibilities for improving the automated identification of COI/bias. It should be a badge of honour to be a foot soldier for such a task force.
[Disclaimer: I don't and won't edit on WP for money—it couldn't be afforded, anyway. Nor do I enjoy the luxury of being able to edit during paid office hours.] Tony (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:COI#Financial Paid editing is a straight case of the conflict of interests that should be dealt according to WP:COI (that IMHO should be a policy and have more teeth in this). Thus, at the very least paid editing should be acknowledged as a matter of course.
Looking from the goals of the project paid editing might help to create new content that is a good thing but also might encourage bias and POV disputes and so might be quite dangerous. In my opinion we should encourage sponsoring of creation of the new content (like our Wikipedia:REWARD does e.g. an Australian entomological society sponsors creation articles on Australian insects) and discourage or even outright ban sponsoring POV pushing (e.g. an elected official or a commercial entity sponsoring articles promoting itself). One of the bad cases of POV pushing sponsoring might be a government agency hiring PR professionals to glorify (or whitewash) their policies on wiki (e.g. Russian of Georgian government paying PR professionals to influence 2008 South Ossetia war article). I have not yet seeing a convincing case of such meddling but the accusations are quite common and the matter can be quite damaging if it happan in reality).
Another case could be bribes for administrative actions. I am not sure if it ever happen but I was once offered something that looked like one (and obviously refused). I think paid administrative (bureaucratic, oversight, checkuser, arbitrator, etc.) actions should lead to immediate removal of the privileged bits.
This is basically my position: all paid editing should be acknowledged. Sponsoring of "good editing" should be encouraged while "bad paid editing" should be a blockable affair. Administrative bribes (if proven) should lead to desysopping.
Rootology is a terrible idea. Civilizededucation ( talk) 07:59, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand your statement. Do you mean his idea is bad, or that "Rootology" (what ever that discipline is supposed to be about) is a bad idea? (I assume you don't mean that he, himself, is a "terrible idea" ;-) -- llywrch ( talk) 16:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Paid editing represents a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest may result in biased editing even when the contributor in question intends to maintain a neutral point of view. For this reason, editors who have previously (i.e. prior to the opening of this RfC) accepted money for their efforts have an ethical responsibility to disclose their financial gain. Disclosing these past conflicts of interest will allow other editors to evaluate whether any neutrality problems have arisen. In the event that an editor does not move to divulge these interests and is shown to have taken money in return for publication of Wikipedia articles or advocacy in the article space, it should be taken as evidence that that person is not editing with the intention of improving the encyclopedia. Such an editor is disruptive and should be subject to community sanctions.
It will not be possible to rid Wikipedia of all paid editing. However, all future paid editing in the article space should be prohibited by policy. The time required of unpaid editors to evaluate and/or extirpate NPOV violations from articles written by paid editors is time taken away from the development of more compliant portions of the encyclopedia. Any individual or for-profit organization shown to have commissioned an article should be considered a banned user, and a user who is shown to have accepted funds from such a source should be subject to the terms of the ban, as per Wikipedia:Banning policy#Editing on behalf of banned users. Dekimasu よ! 16:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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I can't endorse due to the existance of some paid editors doing good neutral work, see statement by pfctdaye. This blanket ban would left them out of wikipedia. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 01:22, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
This debate was precipitated by someone spotting some paid editing actually going on so I've gone through the account mentioned
[6] and matched the adverts ("clients") up with the articles created by
User:Zithan. I recommend that people read the full text of each paid editing advert (the full version in the link at
Ha!/paid editing adverts) and then assess the related article that was created, as it will provide an insight into paid editing that can then inform the debate
Note: I didn't realise you can't read the full text of the adverts unless you sign up for a (free) Elance account. I've put that full text at Ha!/paid editing adverts
I'm 100% sure on these correlations and have much more detailed "proof" and reasoning if there's any doubt (it's not hard to work out by just reading the adverts/jobs). Sometimes blank or unrelated articles were initially created in a sandbox months earlier and later moved to the article name, so some article creation dates may seem out of sync with the advert bidding dates, but they match when those moves are taken into account. There are three adverts
[19]
[20] I couldn't match up - but they will turn out to
Dave Levine/
Sextoy or the range of
Marketing Performance Measurement and Management articles or
Qualifying Industrial Zone as those are the only other articles created by this user (the account was used almost exclusively for these paid articles)
It's clear to me that these articles were created for the benefit of the companies and individuals concerned and not for the benefit of the Wikipedia project. On close scrutiny it's obvious that skilful and experienced editing and knowledge about how to stay on the right side of policy has been used to create the impression of respectability, reliable sourcing, some mutual reinforcement and notability.
I propose that any paid editing must be openly declared in the same way as if it was the subject themselves that was creating or editing the article, but also with an open declaration by the editor that they are being paid for it. Ha! ( talk) 16:43, 12 June 2009 (UTC) To be clearer, this would only be in the event that paid editing is accepted - which is something that I believe would be very damaging to the project on a practical as well as an ethical level. Ha! ( talk) 14:08, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Comment
I've added some more from another Elance account to the list above and added the details to
User:Ha!/paid editing adverts.
Ha! (
talk) 01:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
This is being oversimplified to no end. Paid editing has a lot of repercussions beyond anything any supporters of it have considered so far. Just to name one which was still not brought up is the filtering of administrators. If someone is paid for the job, he will obviously have more time to edit than the average editor because he will not edit only in his free time but also during working hours. Wikipedia is built in a way that edit counts is the number one qualifier to become an administrator. Those being paid will be overrepresented in the higher positions because they have more time to contribute than others. So in a way, with the money, you are not only buying articles but also the higher positions. It's just ethically wrong to give any position to any editor when there is any monetary gain in his contribution which is against the spirit of voluntary work.
Another major problem, lets suppose you have two editors with 40,000 edits (both in a period of two years) presenting themselves for adminship. The first one is paid and the second is not. It can be assumed that in a big sample where a group is in one category and another in the other, in average those being paid have a higher background than the unpaid one who made 40,000 edits. Now comparing the higher background editors among them, on average those who are paid will have on average more edits. Those editors have both the background and the number of edits, opening them the door to any of the higher positions.
The result of this is obvious, those on the higher position will not be motivated mostly because of their interest for the project itself. Some people brought up that editors who are paid or not do it for reasons. Well, let it present it this way, will you grant adminship to a nationalist POV pusher? His contribution is at risk of being motivated by other things than the encyclopedic nature of the project. I'd rather give that position to honest contributors when all, I mean, all of his edits are made to further the project.
And here I am presenting one problem among many others, which is not directly linked to content itself. Because not only content will suffer, when the volunteers will stand no chance against the paid editors.
Like I previously said and also along the lines of what Jimbo has proposed, paid editing can be done elsewhere, it should be to the non-paid volunteers to know what can be retrieved to be brought on Wikipedia.
It also boggles me that some supporters will reply by saying that Jimbo himself has a monetary advantage with the project itself. But how does his gain endanger the integrity of the project like paid editing would? - Fedayee ( talk) 17:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment Regarding the edit count equaling adminship qualification - very few articles will be covered by just one patron, and where there is a disproportionate effort in one area (unless it is gnomish activity) most reviewers at RfA will usually determine a lack of overall input and !vote against. As for Jimbo, his opinions are important but the community has evolved passed the requirement for automatic felicity to his word. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:59, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I only believe fifty percent of the technical information on Wikipedia and on the internet. Any technical article that is not peer reviewed by 20 to 30 competent technical reviewers is of questionable value. Although I have coordinated the review of approximately 150 technical papers, I am still concerned that I might have allowed the publication of an article that was pure science fiction. Fortunately, other researchers will repeat experiments when they question the results of another scientist. I doubt that Wikipedia has adequate staff to assure the accuracy of the technical content on its website.
One of my friends is paid to edit the technical content of a publication. The quality of the technical portion of the publication has dramatically improved while he has been the editor.
I realize that I and other members of the academic community volunteer our time as editors. However, I believe that more professors would volunteer to serve as editors if they were paid.
It is true, as some note, that paid editing already happens and will continue to happen whether we sanction the practice or not. I take this as an excellent reason to tighten our standards to stop and frustrate it wherever we can. Using it as a rationale to authorize it is to my mind an abject abdication of our core principles, those being NPOV, unbiased writing, keeping us from being a soapbox for advocacy and keeping us a volunteer effort which fosters all those policies. Paid editing and NPOV and related policies are implacable enemies. This would be giving the foxes the keys to the henhouse rather than acknowledging that foxes are out there prowling, but doing our damnest to keep the doors shuttered. Someone compared this earlier to decriminalizing drugs (which I am for); it is not. It is akin to a practice we all recognize as a society as inherently criminal or immoral, the decriminalization of which might have some minor, surface-only silver lining, completely out of proportion to its negatives, but we do it anyway because "hey, we can't stop it entirely and it will go on whether we make it a crime or not, so let's just write into the law that it's okay, and puts some processes in place to regulate [that inherently bad] conduct".
A person writing for a company is 100% beholden to them and if they are experts at using Wikipedia, they will win most of the time. This is especially true when our resources are stretched thin and boy would they be in short order. Someone comes to me and pays me to write an article, don't you think it would be easy for me to game the system, twist and pervert a few policies here and there, " including that criticism would be undue weight", and "no, the the burden is one you" and "you're not assuming good faith! and I was just being bold!, and making false sockpuppetry reports and well, we all know how many WP:BEANS ways there are to make the whole process a nightmare for admins and experienced good faith editors who are trying to deal with a canny POV warrior who knows our policies to some extent. Just wait until they are paid to be experts—not just at writing but at gaming Wikipedia; they will have manuals describing strategies to use, sockpuppets hidden by in-house IT professionals, and an army of coordinated meatpuppets in different geographic locations to draw on, and they will edit Wikipedia all day long motivated by money. It is a nightmare scenario.
"But we already have all manner of COIs; with disclosure we will be able to regulate them." No you will be converted, subsumed or made irrelevant over time. Yes, we have COIs (and that guideline would be a policy with fangs under my ideal version of Wikipedia) but there is a scale to them; a manner in which they manifest that keeps them under some wraps; by discouraging them; looking down upon them; having G11, and WP:SPAM and our NPOV policy as a bulwark and others, we keep them in some check. A secondary effect I project in allowing paid editing will be to increase our regular COIs by many orders of magnitude. Things have to be scalable to be dealt with, and we will reach a threshold beyond which our best efforts will be bailing water from a sinking ship with thimbles.
Allowing paid editing would allow companies, even with "disclosure", to mount an effort that we could never keep in check. The resources they would bring to the table would tie us in knots. And the long picture is that even if you stay—aren't converted by the very insidious appeal of making an avocation your vocation and aren't driven away by the idea that you're donating your time while others are being paid—you're just early members of an indefinite project. The long term prospects for this are 1, 2, 3 more? millions of articles all written by companies like "Wikipedia Writers Associates, Inc." "The company with the know how to make your Wikipedia article stick!" ( ♯ insert jingle ♯ )." They would have a twenty page form where they asked what the company wanted WWA to stump for in the article, what should be minimized or mentioned in a way that takes the sting out of, and so on, and they would advertise perfect confidentiality as to what you asked them to do and that they would strictly keep their client list private within the bounds of the law.
One premise used in support of this is that good content is good content (an FA or GA is an FA or GA). An underlying assumption in stating this is that there is a workable and easy way to assess whether an article meets both our policies and our stated assessment criteria for fine articles. There is not. All of our good content, every single well-developed article on Wikipedia—every single one—was not built from collaboration by thousands of different people adding content here and there. And certainly, concerted efforts at promotion are not stopped and "decontaminated" by drive by editing. We are a collaboration but it's not any pure form that that word standing alone may imply to some people. Drive by editors fix mistakes, add facts, change a word here or there, etc., but reliable, well organized, unbiased, sourced articles are in all cases written by a core group, sometimes just one person, sometimes a few, who organize, focus, do research and cite facts, while writing and shaping the main content. The meaning of this is that that core group vastly controls the final product. "Ah", you say, "but we have assessment processes that will take care of any problems such as promotional tone, POV problems, failure to include anti-material"—all the things that our neutrality policy covers. They will make sure the article is comprehensive as to material in general and that there is proper weight given to negative and positive material... Nope. That is an oversimplification that crumbles upon closer examination.
It is well nigh impossible to take a fully written article that is grossly promotional, subtly promotional, or both, and fully remediate it; not just by fixing its tone, but in all manner of subtle ways that affect the end article: shades-of-meaning word choices, careful omissions, emphasis on one fact and de-emphasis on another, organization that places one thing before another for a purpose, choice of reliable sources used, even things like which products to mention in a list of examples that a company manufactures (and only they know which ones they want to promote now), and on and on. People at WP:PR and WP:FAC and those who do review in less formalized ways are not omniscient, which is what it would take. They question whether a source is reliable and they sometimes say "why isn't X included", and much more, but they aren't normally experts on the subject, and they are not rewriting from the base up and they haven't spent 100 hours (or maybe a career) studying the subject. Without being that kind of an expert, and doing a complete rewrite, they can never remediate all the nuanced sneaky and subtle promotion. We would be their shills and they would be us before long. No, they'll catch many surface defects and some of the more subtle problems, but the article will never resemble that never written article that truly disinterested third parties would have composed.
X giant corporation's professionally hired and written article about itself by Wikipedia writing experts, and vetted at great labor by our best disinterested personnel, will still be chock full of promotion that you won't be able to find because it will be built into the base structure and manifest itself in ways that are so hard to recognize, they're more about the path not taken. We will never get to compare that article to what it would have been, but only if you saw that, could you recognize the difference.
And that's best case scenario for articles that do go through some sort of rigorous assessment against our policies. Most articles never get that type of treatment. Enforcing our policies after the fact is many times as difficult and less efficient as having them instilled by belief so they are *truly* followed by those writing content, ab initio. I say truly because I do not mean by this, people who are intimately familiar with all we expect and knowing that, try to meet the appearance of compliance. But there won't be anyone minding the store to even try to do this. We will sleep with the enemy and we will be transformed, not just tomorrow but over the long haul. The singular effect of having others paid to do what you do for free will drive away not just some of our present editors, but a much larger number of future editors. They will never become "hooked for free" because there will be no philosophical altruistic model to make them want to come. Someone mentioned a soup kitchen analogy earlier which I think was spot on. Your future brethren will not resemble you.
You ever look in the newspaper at movie ads? Normally every single ad has one or more quotes from people extolling the movie's virtues. Actually good movies have excerpts from The New York Times and Rolling Stone because they actually got a real review. Bottom of the barrel crap also has "best movie ever" pullquoted, but when you examine the source, it's always some person or organization you've never heard of. Often those are quotes from publications whose sole business is to write glowing reviews of offal so they can be quoted in movie ads where no industry person with integrity would.
Similarly, if we do this, in ten years there will be publications built on the business model of supplying for hire seemingly reliable sources so that Wikipedia articles can supply some peacock factoid, or rebuttal of criticism, or maybe even to be used to insert a sourced statement geared towards raising the company's stock price minutely during a particular time frame so that the accountants at some transnational have the ability to shave some pennies off a number used to calculate quarterly tax payments. It will all be okay, because even if discovered, it will only be seen as minor "wiki-spin" by some lower echelon functionary who would receive the blame, if any was needed. At that point it wouldn't be seen as an embarrassing thing to do as it is now and it would be very unlikely that anyone would catch subtle manipulation because Wikipedia would have already officially allow companies to edit their own articles and to hire people to do so. It would just be the status quo and we would probably be nicknamed McPedia already by that future time so who would care? Let us reject this with a resounding no, no, a thousand times no!
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Biases fall on a continuum. On one extreme end would be "0 bias motivation": the person who likes to learn by writing and writes on a random topic just to learn about it (I've done that). Somewhere near to that end would be the person who writes because they are intellectually fascinated by a topic, then "involved as a hobby or career"; I won't belabor this by listing every interstitial point I can think up, but on the opposite end of our fictitious scale would be those writing to influence a fanatically held religious or other worldview position and, at the very apex, would be those who are paid by a third party, hired to promote that person or entity's image. Why? Because they have a 100% likelihood of being biased, having contracted to write a panegyric, and are accountable to that third party with money at stake.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk) 22:33, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
The main argument in favour of paid editing made above is that it doesn't really matter as other editors would correct any policy violations. From what I've seen, this isn't correct. It wouldn't be difficult for a medium-sized organisation or semi-famous person to put together an article on them which meets the notability standards. Once the initial checking of the new article is done its unlikely that anyone would watchlist the article and it would then be easy to add over-statements while ensuring that nothing negative is allowed to remain. This article would then be one of the first things to appear on Google searches on the topic (making it a useful, and cheap, form of advertising) and it's very unlikely that anyone would care enough to ensure that the article was factual and neutral and/or be prepared to fight the paid editor over content on an obscure topic. Nick-D ( talk) 00:28, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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The argument that paid editing has a potential to generate good articles for the project has some validity. I can see philanthropic groups who want to support good editors to encourage their work for creating a free encyclopedia available to anyone with an internet connection. But I see a whole bunch of problems coming up also if paid editing is allowed for anyone and everyone. as pointed out above many individuals , companies & groups will likely pay editors of their choice money to create and subsequently maintain articles favorable towards them. Reputation of Wikipedia as a reliable source of info will likely suffer with this. What other encyclopedia lets you pay to write a paid article about yourself, your client your company or your organization even if it is an excellent article ?? Also if I was Bill Gates I could hire a zillion editors across the globe to make sure no mention of Anti trust allegations against Microsoft ever surfaces in the articles. any volunteer editors will soon stop touching the article once they realize that any mention of negative info will soon be purged. worse a competing company would hire another zillion editors to push their point of view. It will soon be WW3. I can see a whole industry developing and coming up with innovative ways to defeat wiki policies to ensure favorable articles for their clients for the right fee. Wikireader41 ( talk) 05:41, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
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Two thought experiments:
Postscript — I should make clear that these hypothetical situations are meant to raise questions about where the WP:COI risks lie. The first does have WP:COI risks, but since no paid editing is done in article space, it is not clear what measures can be taken against it, and it seems analogous to the situation that Jimbo explicitly says is legitimate (i.e., commissioning a copyrighter to write GFDL copy). Should the editor be barred if they are a freelance copywriter? The second seems to be verifiably free of COI risk, but is paid editing in article space. — — Charles Stewart (talk) 13:37, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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Comment
The only trouble with paid editing in general is biased (either positively or negatively) material about the subject. I have requested deletion of several promotional articles—most of which are done through speedy deletion. I often judge on the content of the article (which sometimes lead me to nominating corporate stubs for deletion).
Sticking to the more established Wikipedia policies about notability, advertising, and defamation, the only articles that can be deleted are those that are severely-biased and/or discussing about hardly-known subjects. As I have said outside Wikipedia:
“ | Anyone who would advertise paid editing of Wikipedia would lead the project into corruption. Why pay someone else if you can do it yourself? Wikipedia is open for everyone, without distinctions of any kind and without limitations in any manner. | ” |
I handled such a case some time ago. The report is just to show you the potential damages of paid editing, once tolerated too much. I don't want more of this to appear. Otherwise, entire corporations could wage edit wars against one another and they would go out of our control. Alexius08 ( talk) 02:50, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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Regarding that quote you wrote above, I found it kind of humorous. The entire point of your statement is that nobody who is paid to write should be editing Wikipedia, yet you finish off by contradicting yourself with, "Wikipedia is open for everyone, without distinctions of any kind and without limitations in any manner." -->David Shankbone 14:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
One problem I have seen arise from "paid editing" of one kind or another is scandals surrounding undisclosed edits from one organization or another. Most of this ultimately falls under WP:COI, but I do think that careful attention does need to be paid to edits made by people who are being paid to make them. In many cases the edits are not harmful (and can easily amount to having someone from an office patrol a page to watch for and revert vandalism), but there is always the chance that an attempt will be made to influence the direction of Wikipedia. This is particularly the case with political campaigns (I am made to think of the John Howard editing controversy some years back), but it can be the result of any group or organization (or even a person) desiring a better spin on themselves on here.
With this in mind, I believe that undeclared paid edits need to be made a blockable offence. This should probably only actually result in a block after a warning or two, but if someone is repeatedly influencing the viewpoint of an article and not declaring what is a very clear and present COI, then either the user needs to be tagged as having that COI or, in the interest of preserving impartiality, they need to be blocked. As to paid edits, I feel that they should be flagged for review; a "paid" grammar fix is not so bad, but many of these edits will not be simple corrections or vandalism reverts, and as such they do need some form of third-party review, which flagging would accomplish.
As I said, I do not see paid editing as inherently evil. It is when said editing is also undeclared and unmonitored that a problem will almost inevitably arise, and it is unmonitored, undeclared paid editing that needs to be banned. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tyrenon ( talk • contribs) 06:14, 15 June 2009
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I had a little poke around some paid editor havens and what I found was quite disturbing. A summary of my findings is Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Paid editing roundup*. WikiProject Spam would like your help in discovering who these guys are on Wikipedia and what they want to spam.
Even more disturbing is this one and this one (US$ 270), which only just concluded. It is starting to look like another sockpuppet. MER-C 07:34, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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All this talk over the merits or evils of "paid editing" misses the larger significance of having people editing Wikipedia for money, namely, that eventually not only will article-space edits be sold to the highest bidder (which people don't seem to have much of a problem with), but ALL edits will be bought and paid for, including administrator actions. Being paid for article editing just will "open the door" to the sale of all edits.
Erich Mendacio (
talk) 19:31, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Note: The person who made this statement has been indefinitely banned by the Wikipedia community, and is not permitted to edit Wikipedia pages (including this one) absent the ban being lifted. - Pete ( talk) 18:33, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
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Jimbo's statement notwithstanding, the current de facto policy is that known paid editors are treated as if they have a conflict of interest, all but eliminating any motivation to disclose. What's the point of paying someone if they are neutered in their ability to make the edits you want made? On the other hand if they are caught after the fact, they are banned for not disclosing and their edit history is gone over with a fine-toothed comb, again removing the benefit to the sponsor.
If we loosen this up and allow paid editors to make substantial edits, there is no going back, large swaths of Wikipedia will become commercialized within months if not weeks, established editors will quit in disgust, and the character and content of the project will change. On the other hand if we keep the status quo or implement an all-out ban we can loosen up a few years down the road if times and community consensus changes. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 01:56, 16 June 2009 (UTC) typo fixed 00:07, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
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If the article on Big Company X has sources to show that it cured world hunger, then it cured world hunger regardless of who edited the article. And if you want the article to say that Big Company X killed babies, then it's your responsibility to add those reliable sources to prove it. I have every right to start an article on myself that is supported by reliable sources and you have no right to accuse me of being non-neutral if you can't find sources to prove it.
I don't see where the hysteria's coming from. We (the real editors) aren't going anywhere. We've already found tons of paid editors, scrutinized their edit histories, went through all their articles, deleted the non-notable ones, removed the false facts, fixed the wording, added the negative facts that were omitted, slapped {neutrality} and {cleanup} templates all over everything, removed their admin status. We've done this over and over again. I see no reason why this would stop in the future. The prediction that "This will ruin us" is based on the supposition that there will be so many paid editors that we will not be able to control them. How is that economically feasible? We have 10,000,000 user accounts, assume 0.1% of those are active and you still have 10,000 users. No company is going to waste money fighting 10,000 people to keep their articles pristine when there are much easier ways to get a Google presence. We will always outnumber the paid editors and we will always be around to go through and get their articles in line. This dystopia will never happen.
Of course we should find the paid editors, pick on them, fix their articles, scrutinize everything they've done. We should have a task force that just does that. But deleting an article on a notable topic because it's not neutral? That doesn't make any sense at all. That's like deleting a notable article because it's full of typos or doesn't have inline citations; that's like deleting an article on a notable band because it talks about how great they are. If a subject is not notable, delete it immediately with extreme prejudice and don't look back. If it's notable, there's no justification at all for deleting it, and there's no justification at all for banning the user who made it. Fix the problems or put a template on it and let someone else do it.
Look at these articles. Brad Sugars Ken Underwood These articles suck. They are laughably awful. All paid articles will be. We've (the real editors) been editing this encyclopedia for years, we've evaluated FAs, we've had our articles meticulously criticized, we know exactly what NPOV looks like and this crap sticks out like a sore thumb. Let the paid users edit, watch what they do and fix it when it sucks. That's what we do here.
"Allowing" paid edits doesn't mean you have to leave them in place. If they make the encyclopedia worse, undo them. Just like anything else. The idea that paid shills will all become admins en masse and take over the encyclopedia is laughable. There's a long, arduous process for becoming an admin and a blatantly poor edit history will stop it in its tracks. Admins have already been removed for non-neutrality, and will continue to.
There's no need for this apocalypse talk and there's no need to go around banning people. They are still contributing, they're just contributing their side. The encyclopedia is never harmed by information as long as it's verifiable. No, it won't always work. Lots of spam articles will slip through the cracks. But that's going to be the case whether you ban these people or not, just as there will always be non-notable band articles and poorly cited history articles and former featured articles that completely fell apart. It's not perfect but there's no reason to get upset about that.
Summary: I'm strongly in favor of treating COI and paid editing just like any other bad editing. If an article has a problem, fix it or put it through the appropriate process. If you can't point out a demonstrable problem, then you have no right to assume their is one just because money changed hands, and you have no right to accuse an editor of being a bad editor based on his financial interests alone. This does not mean that we need to sit back and let this turn into McPedia. We can watch out for this stuff and track everything these users are doing, but we should resolve it the same way we resolve everything else. Sockpuppetry is still an offense, revert wars are still an offense, inserting false information and removing real information is still an offense. There will never be enough momentum for this to "ruin us". — Werson ( talk) 22:24, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
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At the end of the day, paid writing happens on Wikipedia. Jimmy is content with keeping it underground and illicit, but I think his perspective does not consider a fundamental challenge that time poses to Wikipedia's growth. As our rules, guidelines, culture and bureaucracy become more complex, it becomes more difficult to break our surface. Our wikified article text and templates, and in particular our eye-crossing citation layouts, separate text in ways that are too bizarre to stare at for even a trained eye (mine). Our edit boxes used to be more clean. Our bureaucracy and rules, and the nuances in them, are a challenge to comprehend. Even seasoned editors are continually--and incorrectly--told that they are at the wrong place to have a problem addressed. After a recent media event, it's been heavily reported that we have a "Supreme Court".
Nobody but a small subset (you and me) wants to learn all of this! It is a challenge for a person, or company, to become involved in navigating our weird world. In my experience, article subjects have disastrously horrible attempts to talk with us and learn our MOS, policies and guidelines. Examples are too numerous to mention.
If nobody cares about the subject, it sits there dead in the water, hurting us, hurting them, with either misinformation or WEIGHT problems. We see this over and over. It hurts our reputation. It makes us appear clannish and insular; impossible to understand outside a massive investment of time. We seem ambivalent to the real-life consequences a bad article has for a subject that none of us cares about. We can be inadvertently, and sometimes intentionally, insulting when we do interact with a subject reaching out. There are good experiences, but the bad ones are legendary.
Paid writing helps resolve an inevitable problem of time: our increasingly labyrinthine internal structure.
Everyone is worried about PR hounds and infomercial products. That will be out there, but it is now as well. That ignores that there's a real world out there that both Jimmy and I have interacted with. I would find it hard to believe if Jimmy said he has not come across many people in the last eight years who would simply love just to pay someone to write a decent, balanced article about them than what they found. In my experience, these people are fine with paying someone for their knowledge to fix it. These people have limited time, and their wikignorant assistants fare little better. I think it's an unfair response to them to say: wait until somebody feels like it.
You don't have to ask Jimmy and me, you can ask OTRS. They hear problems all the time that could be resolved if the subject had the option to engage an editor to fix a meritorious, but perhaps complex, problem. A WikiProject could be set up. Editors could register to accept such work, and when engaged, would register the work to be completed. I envision a community-wide opportunity; run in above-board system where neutral editors who don't even know a subject could work on their articles. Registration, a code of ethics, a likely army of on- and off-site oversight would make policy-compliant improvements and everyone much better off in the attainment of WP:ENC. I think it's a fair and just option, particularly for BLPs. -->David Shankbone 01:31, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I've thought a lot about this and my position on the matter is a bit radical. I don't just think paid editing should be permitted; I think it should be actively encouraged. Paid editing and volunteer editing can safely coexist, just as commercial photography and freely-licensed photography coexist. The benefits of paid editing are numerous:
There is often a tacit assumption that all or most paid editing would be promotional of a single commercial entity - but there are countless additional channels for income. Professional organizations often want to see expansion in their area of profession to generate interest in the area among students selecting a career. The many tiny foreign-language Wikipedias can benefit from recruiting poor native speakers who otherwise could not afford to contribute. People from a little-known culture or with a scholarly interest in an esoteric area may want to see coverage of that area expanded for the sake of posterity. Effectively, the charity is transplanted from the contributors directly donating their time to third parties donating money to a specific cause.
It is often claimed that if a user is paid to cover a subject, they will be motivated to portray it in a biased light to please their employer. The fact is, however, that the market doesn't work like that. Users who write biased articles will be banned or blocked, and their articles rapidly removed - as a consequence, people stop hiring them, because they can't achieve results. Only people who work with the system, follow policy, and create realistic expectations with their clients, will achieve long-term success as a paid editor, and other paid editors will follow their example in the hopes of similar success. Our ability to police contributions and impose sanctions, and the interaction of this with the market, is the only defense against biased paid editors that we require.
Of course paid editing is a manifest conflict of interest, but this is dealt with effectively by our existing policy, which specifies that such conflicts should be openly declared. Restriction of paid editing only forces users to hide these concerns.
Another objection I've often heard is that the presence of paid users is a discouragement to volunteer contributors. In analogy with many jobs like photography and software development, paid editors and volunteer editors can happily coexist - studies on motivation of Wikipedia users point to factors like community recognition and a feeling of impact that don't go away just because paid editors show up. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that paid editors will supplant volunteer users, partly because they will tend to edit different topic areas (generally, areas that require expansion and have few interested editors at present), and partly because paid editors and volunteer editors can effectively cooperate. Some users may be driven off by the presence of paid editors out of a sense of ideological purity, but I believe the benefits as enumerated above would be vastly more beneficial to the project as a whole.
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I don't find paid editing to be be anything wrong if the article follows the basic Wikipedia norms of WP:NPOV, WP:RS and other manuals. However a message can be put on the top saying that it is a paid edited article and need to be verified by an administrator for accuracy. The ultimate benefit is of the Wikipedia if it gets a good article out of a paid editing. Moreover, many users often write article which are closely linked to them, though they are not paid they may contain some conflict of interest contents. And for some students it can obviously help them to support their huge cost of education. Amartyabag TALK2ME 13:01, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
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Let me say this simply: paid editing should be allowed, if disclosed. Why should we care what is the editors motivation for creating articles? People do it because of various reasons, not all of them pure and altruistic. What about editors who create articles not for money but to please someone or as a favor? What about students creating articles for an assignment, and getting paid in (hopefully) good grades? What about editors creating articles to get wiki awards? We shouldn't care if somebody is doing this for $, as long as content is good (npov, notable, etc.) and this is disclosed (for COI-npov analysis). In the end, there should be only one question to ask: has Nichalp articles helped Wikipedia or not? -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 16:30, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
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Wikipedia rests on a universal assumption of good faith -- the concept that every editor's top priority is to improve WP. It is this presumption that allows us to strive for consensus rather than see every dispute as a battle. Even the most biased editor can still put improving the project first and can thus be reasoned with. Of course, there are some few editors out there who don't put the project first, but they ultimately get censured or banned unless they are very sneaky, because there incompatible motivations eventually lead them to misconduct. This enforcement allows the contributing community to maintain a certain necessary level of faith in one another.
Allowing paid editors would erode this system. Where a biased editor can still put WP first despite their bias, a paid editor fundamentally has a higher master: their employer. By explicitly accepting paid editors, we would be endorsing an abandonment of our underlying principle for editor conduct: when you're editing on Wikipedia, improving the project comes first. Ultimately it comes to this: despite any bias, while contributing is an editor's allegiance first to Wikipedia or to something else? If its to something else, they shouldn't be welcome. No paid editing.
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I have three basic points that I don't think I've seen anybody else address:
What follows is a tldr analysis of why it will be hard to define "paid advocacy" distinctly from other forms of paid editing, including types that have previously not been controversial, and other types that while controversial arguably have some merits. It is not an essential component of my statement, but does explain the chain of reasoning that led me to the three conclusions above, and should be very relevant to anyone trying to draft a definition for a policy on "paid advocacy". It is entirely possible to agree with some or all of the three conclusions for completely different reasons :)
Reasoning and examples for these conclusions
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Consider a payment to write general articles about green energy made by an environmental charity, a non-profit organization such as a think tank, a governmental energy department, or a power company. Which of these is "most wrong"? Is one "more bannable" than the others? They all seem likely to emphasize viewpoints favorable to green energy. My (politically leftist) gut instinct feels that the power company is "worse", but actually that's because I'm thinking about the motivation of the client, not the editor. If the contract was simply to write articles on green energy, then the editor has the same motivation in every case. Admittedly the editor may take the views of the client into particular account if remuneration is at their discretion, but we shouldn't assume the biases and motivations of the client are simply transplanted into the editor. For instance, an editor would not seek to cultivate a reputation on-wiki as a POV-pusher, especially a paid-for one, so is strongly incentivized to follow many of our content and conduct restrictions. I also suspect that some of my discomfort with paid editing is due to me projecting my distaste for corporations and celebrities - key users of public relations - onto paid editors who might provide services for them. But it seems likely that editors being paid by charities, think tanks, qangos or governmental departments would all face similar conflicts of interest and would have similar motivations and pressure when editing. The identity of the client should not be the determining factor used to define the wikicrime of "paid advocacy". Perhaps a better factor to consider is the (essentially contractual) nature of the client-editor relationship. If the contract rewards the creation or maintenance of an article that is broadly sympathetic to the client or its views, this would be the example par excellence of paid advocacy. This is the scenario waving the red flag right now. Yet perhaps even here the situation is more complex than it seems. Can we imagine circumstances where an editor can satisfy our content and conduct requirements (possibly in a slightly revised form) impeccably while fulfilling such contractual obligations? What if the COI is declared in some open way (the top of the article talk page seems logical, as with {{ Notable Wikipedian}}) and the edits are suitably scrutinized (for instance, if they are always discussed on the talk page first except in cases covered by WP:BLP)? My viewpoint on this is skewed by my memories of the days prior to BLP, when instances arose where {{ sofixit}} was waved in the faces of people who discovered inaccuracies or unbalanced slants in their own biographies, as if the cyber-cosmic punishment for becoming a person of note was to be landed with the responsibility for regularly checking and maintaining your Wikipedia article. The dangerous fallacy had arisen that "anyone can edit" means "everybody is an editor" - but as our labyrinth of policies, guidelines and even editing syntax becomes more impregnable, that is clearly unrealizable. What difference does it make if instead of the subject commenting on the talk page or removing an obvious untruth, their wiki-literate PR agent does? Mostly a positive one, I expect: the agent would be more familiar with content requirements and editing procedure, and might well have excellent records of press coverage meeting WP:RS (including knowing if a report contained factual errors; on semi-obscure biographies with few available sources I've often found that the quality of sources is low too, so such personal knowledge is especially useful). There are thousands of articles on minor actors, musicians and writers, where I would rest easier knowing that a suitably experienced PR agent was watching over them, rather than relying on our internal unsystematic monitoring. Yeah, OTRS exists, and for discretion it's obviously a superior method for agents to use. But I can imagine some gains from allowing a subject's representatives to feed into the editing process (even if limited to talk page discussions and non-controversial edits) in an open, more clearly regulated way. Much of this applies to articles on companies too. Some of the contracts that sparked the current furore, however, were not of the red-flagged, "payment for positive coverage" type, but "payment for coverage at all". Many more people, products and organizations meet our criteria for notability than we have the capacity to create articles for. Having even a neutral, non-promotional Wikipedia article might be vanity for an individual, or of commercial value to a company, but creating an article here is actually pretty hard (both technically and to demonstrate satisfaction of inclusion criteria) so the growth of a market for relevant expertise is unsurprising. Many of the advertisements made clear that they did not seek a whitewash, just a relatively short, neutral, well-referenced article. So long as the notability criteria are actually met, and there's nothing wrong with the article content, it's not obvious what harm is caused by users working under such a contract. Certainly this would introduce a systemic coverage bias among justabout-notable companies, favoring those prepared to pay for coverage, but we already have biases in favor of those that just so happen to be local to active Wikipedians, have Wikipedians among their staff, or occupy a niche market that a Wikipedian is interested in. Some advantages are also evident: the company may well possess good records of prior press coverage, and provide quality, free media - the latter may be difficult or impossible to obtain independently, particularly things like photographs of a factory floor. This type of contract seems to me to be a "yellow flag" - I'd rather regulate it (I'd prefer full COI disclosure on talk pages, and perhaps that a userfied version is independently vetted before being moved to mainspace) than ban anyone found doing it. Because of the circumstances of this discussion, the focus has largely been on editors freelancing for contracts. The Greenspun project involved WMF paying illustrators to create content, an indication there is no blanket rule against paid contributions (although in that case the pay was open, public, and not from an external organization). Pfctdayelise mentioned German government editing subsidies. Other users have noted other types of paid editing e.g. an employee working in company time (pfctdayelise mentions User:Linguistlist); and by analogy the student working for a grade (a non-financial reward, but still an example of someone not working for personal satisfaction, and systemically biasing our articles in favor of their client/professor's field). There is no reason immediately clear to me, to distinguish this kind of situation from that of freelancers. One user account not yet mentioned is User:Nttc, used by the Northern Territory tourist board, relatively uncontroversially. That account was not only one externally paid, but the tourist board had an inherently promotional agenda; the "product" they were selling was the Northern Territory as a tourist destination. Seeking to improve coverage of NT in Wikipedia was a laudable aim, and they were able to contribute some very nice photographs from their website. Would the nature of their work have an impact on their Wikipedia contributions? They presumably had a slant biased to the view that NT is both beautiful and tourist-friendly, and I'm sure that is reflected at least subconsciously in their edits. How would we evaluate whether this counted as part of the crime of "paid advocacy"? Is it damning evidence that Tourism NT is essentially a promotional body, whereas we might be more lenient to some other official bodies? Would we allow a case for the defense, that the edits were all in good faith and from a neutral point of view? Actually I can't recall Nttc being particularly controversial at the time, so in the past we've accepted this as "green flag". I am unconvinced that we can rely on the nature of the contract between editor and client to determine whether we have a case of disallowed "advocacy" or acceptable editing. For those editors who edit as part of their full time work for an organization,it's hard to determine what "promotional" or "advocacy" might mean, especially when editing is done on articles of interest to the organization, as with Linguistlist and Nttc, rather than on the article about the organization itself. Even in the case of freelancers, where the contract is likely to be explicit about whether or not remuneration depends on the article paid for being acceptable to the commissioner (which is surely the essential gap between advocacy, and just doing someone's wikiwork for them), these contractual details are likely to be kept private. We could force editors to disclose them, but we'd have no means of verification in case they just lied. The only remaining option I cans see is to consider the user's contributions and conduct to determine if their editing has crossed into the realms of "paid advocacy". Even this is very tough. We know that "red flag" (paid to give a positive slant) editing goes on today, right now, undisclosed, particularly by publicists. I'm not convinced that it will be easy to pick up distinctly. A history of one-sided, favorable edits to an up-and-coming singer is more parsimoniously interpreted as the work of a fan. Not ideal behavior, and possibly sanctionable, but even if we believe that one-sided editing due to payment is far worse than one-sided editing due to irrational fandom, it will be a brave admin who declares "my guess is that you're getting paid for this, so I'm banning you". For semi-obscure authors, often the only substantial source available for articles is the (naturally promotional) cover blurb they get. Who can tell if it has been inserted into the article by their agent or publisher, rather than an avid reader? Corporate spam and vanity businessperson biographies are perhaps more visible on the radar, since fandom is less likely. Even so, a competent editor of the "yellow flag" type (making new content in reasonable, neutral articles) could probably operate undetected and even pick up a string of WP:DYKss and WP:GAs, without leaving any concrete evidence that they'd been paid to do so. Even some POV-pushing and reputation-polishing can probably slip through: an article may be apparently "neutral" due to the editor consciously ignoring negative coverage of the client and only including sources which are themselves broadly neutral; or only including one piece of criticism (from many) and contrasting it against a rare piece of praise. If anybody picks the editor up on the last point, they could probably reply that they'd innocently misjudged the balance of sources. Perhaps ironically, the "green flag" cases such as User:Nttc are more likely to show up as paid editors (in that case it was obvious since text and images were being copied from NT Tourism's website), but determining whether they cross into "advocacy" territory is actually a tough judgment. It's worth bearing in mind that somebody working for an organization will have their own points of view that slips into their editing, not just those of the employer; further, it's likely that in many cases their biases will match the employer's (somebody working to promote tourism in NT is unlikely to believe NT is a horrible, ugly place... if slightly too effusive language slipped in, for instance, how can you tell if it's their point of view or one they are being paid to promote?). I think this summarizes why it will often be a tough judgment call to work out if someone is actually being paid at all, or in other cases to determine if paid editing transcends acceptability and becomes bannable "advocacy". It seems likely that off-wiki sleuthing is more likely to produce confident accusations of abuse than on-wiki evidence. This will favor people and organizations with the wherewithal to obtain PR strategists with Wikipedia expertise (presumably they are more notable, already have articles they seek to influence, and are likely to engage in "red flag" editing) and instead, as happened this time, flag up a lot of "yellow flag" instances, where smaller players on the borderlines of notability were using freelancing noticeboards to seek the expertise needed to give them an article. Relying on off-wiki evidence is clearly not a perfect solution either. I'm not really offering a solution, if only because I can't see one, at least in any detail. A blanket ban on any form of paid editing is possible, although we know that many kinds of editing are essentially undetectable and are likely only to become more secretive. In a funny way that could be a good thing - the closer an editor follows content and conduct requirements, the less detectable the fact they were (blockworthily) paid for it is. On the other hand it is clear that some productive content creation, and possible new paradigms of editing (linguistlist, nttc) will be lost. If the ban is not blanket, then the criteria for identifying "paid advocacy", including the strength of evidence required, will have to be very carefully drawn up - it certainly can't be left to an admin's common sense - and some attention should be drawn to the different costs and benefits that alternative definitions might have. My main hope is that it would be easier to draw a clear distinction between acceptable and unacceptable paid editing, if there were clear regulations on paid editing - some possibilities include compulsory disclosure, perhaps some forms of editing restrictions, potentially a paid editor's views to have lesser weight when seeking consensus on issues like WP:UNDUE? If this was implemented, the discovery of undisclosed paid editing for instance might immediately result in banning (and not just "please send an explanation to the arbitration committee"). In the case of paid article creation in the case of justabout-notable subjects, compulsory independent assessment of a userfied version might prevent the (unknowable) issue of whether or not the editor is being remunerated for being sympathetic to the subject from being seen as key to acceptability of conduct (although it still raises the risk of experienced editors playing a game of "push what it's possible to get away with and still be deemed acceptably neutral"). Nothing would solve the problem that many editors can and will get away with paid editing, without anyone noticing (or at least being able to prove their suspicions). I've not yet seen anybody produce a coherent possible set of rules for "acceptable" paid editing, if such a thing can be deemed to exist, and I don't believe current COI rules are sufficient. So perhaps my hopes that a new such set of rules would make "paid advocacy" more clearly distinguishable are optimistic. At any rate there are no easy answers. |
Users who endorse this summary: (I think my 3 core points are sufficiently distinct that some editors may wish to partially endorse the summary by indicating the one or two they agree with)
I've long been of the opinion that the real problem is not so much "paid editing" or "paid advocacy", which as noted by many above raise difficult problems of proof and may conflict with the assume good faith requirement. But I think that the truth will out by the (lack of) quality prose and blatant WP:NPOV violations that are going to be found in most truly problematic articles. Spam tends to be patent nonsense as far as I am concerned. Being written in pointy haired boss talk is a dead giveaway. If:
And where the specific concern arises -- paid insertions by non-notable businesses -- the promotional style and intentional NPOV violations will cause any such article to be filled with these obvious stylistic and content flaws. On the other hand, if the article or edit is written in plain English rather than promotional twaddle, and appears to be neutral and referenced, speculation about the editors' motives seems to be mostly irrelevant. The alternative solution is fairly zealous speedy deletion of strongly promotional POV articles about non-consumer business topics.
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Comment:
Just adding a datapoint here. People have been not only openly paid to edit in the past, but the person who came up with the idea was highly praised for his creative experiment. Kasper Souren gave a talk about how he did this at the 2006 Wikimania conference for the Bambara Wikipedia. Unilaterally banning anyone who does this, without any exceptions, is a hasty & potentially harmful idea -- & anyone who is familiar with the Wiimedia projects would know this. -- llywrch ( talk) 16:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
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This is pretty fascinating. I can see how this is controversial and there is always the rule of unintended consequences. I don't see why it shouldn't be allowed. It would be better for transparency in paid editing rather than having anon editors possibly with agendas being paid to secretly influence content. If we're going to do this there should obviously be some set of caveats. One would be to only allow full disclosure of paid editing. If an editor does not disclose they are being paid it should be a bannable offense. Another worry is, although paid editors say they will conform to policy, will they gain enough clout to influence the wording of policy in their favour? I can see a provision where a paid editor has to waive their rights in policy discussion to avoid any conflicts of interest (real or perceived) issues.
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Admittedly I haven't read this entire page (way too long), but I do find the idea of blocking any "paid editor" frankly appalling and contrary to the spirit of putting free content before the "social aspects" of the site. Our license (be it GFDL or the CC license we have chosen to adopt) is quite clear that our content is free for commercial use as well as educational use. While that might in some way seem neither here nor there, it could have bearing on outside organizations that might want to clean up Wikipedia content along a certain theme for eventual use in a publication. For example, say the Pennsylvania department of forestry wanted to put together a mini-encyclopedia about all of the plants, animals, and other organisms that live in Pennsylvania forests. It seems to me there would be nothing wrong with them doing a "roll call" for experienced Wikipedia researchers, botanists, and copy-editors to improve the articles here on Wikipedia rather than importing them to another site and then searching high and low for staff with similar skill sets. If they offer a few bucks for "adopting" articles or groups of articles, I think that would be excellent. And: if they're paying people to do the content improving here on Wikipedia rather than on their private mirror, we all benefit from the added and/or improved content, and they benefit from having thousands of other eyes potentially picking out grammatical or factual errors.
I have actually done paid editing (in a sense) on Wikibooks in the past, and hope to do more of it in the future. Part of my "real life job" involves researching horticultural topics (primarily plants and the things that harm them), and I always add this content to Wikibooks (as well as photos to Commons, and I generally try to improve the WP article as well if I come across encyclopedic material that belongs there). I don't think most of my clients particularly care that I post it on Wikimedia sites, but I do so because I believe in free content, and hope that my work will be improved upon when someone else happens upon new scientific data or finds something I missed.
So to reiterate: blocking any editor who stands to make a few bucks for helping to create quality content is a Very Bad Idea. Advocacy is a completely different thing of course, but (despite what you might think if you only ready the noticeboards) most of Wikipedia's content does not have anything to do with BLP's, companies, or politics. Subtlety is called for, not jerky knees and witch hunts.
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Paid editing raises a second issue that is, as far as I can see, completely unadressed above: copyright. Depending on 1) the relationship between the person paid and the person paying and 2) the legal jurisdiction governing that relationship the writer may or may not have copyright in the words they are writing, and thus may or may not be able to release them under the free content license used by Wikipedia. See work for hire. This creates an obvious problem for the ability of the paid editor to actually produce content that Wikipedia can use. There is no point in having an editor producing content that we would have to delete for copyright reasons.
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Comment:
Many of my thoughts on this matter have been adequately addressed in the twenty-fourth paragraph of George Washington's Farewell Address, particularly in the last two sentences. What isn't covered therein I will cover below.
The main point that has been raised is that paid edits are not necessarily bad. This is true when the person paying is unrelated to the subject of the article he or she wants improved, an event whose happening I have considerable difficulty imagining, or when the article has BLP violations, which should be directed to the OTRS queue. If the subject in the latter case paid someone to fix the article, the paid editor would very likely give the subject his money's worth in "improvements," which is exactly why those violations should be reported to OTRS. The very, very likely scenario would play out something like this:
There is nothing wrong with editing an article with which you have a conflict of interest if you follow NPOV, V, RS, etc., but that standard is generally only observed by active users—that is, users who have actually read the core policies, respect objectivity, and uphold neutrality. The paid revisers of these articles generally would not be active users, would not have read the policies, and would respect only the money that they will receive for their services.
If we permit paid editing, no, we will not be completely inundated with adverts, and the site's administration will not be dominated by corporate interests. And yes, we do have spam articles now; but if we allow paid editing, we will certainly receive more advert-edits than before, which will make us look more like Google than Wikipedia. This same sort of situation always seems to play out on this site with politics, so I'll draw a parallel to lobbyists: They are paid to look out in the government for interest groups, which I view as contrary to the spirit of democracy, much like I view paid editing as contrary to the spirit of a free encyclopedia (in both the copyright sense and the "free-as-in-freedom" sense). As mentioned in the sections above, maybe we would glean some FAs from it, but we can do that with volunteer editors and without the increased amount of unnoticed spam that would come with paid editing.
Summary: The potential negatives of paid editing far outweigh the possible positives. Though paid editing could possibly be used for some beneficent purposes, such as those noted in some of the sections above, the very likely scenarios for its use would be for propaganda or advertising. If you want to advertise, use Google, or start your own wiki. The positive things that paid editing could accomplish can henceforth be and have hitherto been done by volunteer work. This is a free encyclopedia. We need editors, not mercenaries.
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There are far too many statements on this page. For this level of discussion activity, the "Statement/Endorse" approach isn't very helpful. Really we need to find a way to be able to create collaborative Position Statements, and thereby (a) limit the number of statements (b) focus on the arguments and (c) use the same approach we do to articles, which has a certain appealing philosophical consistency.
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Comments:
Evidently, my fellow wikipedians have a short memory span.
Just recently, we encountered this exact situation sans the money with Scientology articles. There, the last resort was the unilateral blocking of all isp addresses from the church due to a never ending war of opinions, and these were from people who were not being paid to edit the articles in question. How much more so will the situation here spiral out if money is added to the equation.
Additionally, there is the matter of being paid to edit a non-profit project. Being paid by a third party to edit on a non-profit organization defeats the entire purpose of a website where people volunteer their time because they believe in the mission and the purpose. What we lack for in income for our editing we make up for internally through our awards and prizes and the occasional mention in offline publication. If that was not enough incentive to contribute originally then why should money serve to lure in new contributors.
Then their is the matter of the community as a whole. A house divided against itself can not stand, and if we embrace paid editing then it is my firm belief that Wikipedia will not be able to endure a split between those who accept payment for article development and thus have a vested interest in maintain the articles and those who contribute to the articles for the purpose upon which the site was founded - expanding human knowledge. In effect, we are discussing a permanent change to wikipedia, and it does invite all manner of bad company to the site.
Lastly, with growing number of online wikis out there, it is my belief that we can safely pass on the money-for-edits position. I have no doubt that sooner or later, if it has not happened already, someone will establish a wiki somewhere with this exact goal in mind, and we can point money for articles people there and they can make all the money they want on another site.
The bottom line, to borrow from Kirill Lokshin's advise to coordinators of the Military history project: "The status quo is generally a stable position, if nothing else; maintaining it for a while longer is unlikely to be as controversial as changing it." — TomStar81 ( Talk) 05:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
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In my opinion anyone means anyone. Everyone should be able to edit Wikipedia no matter he\she is or isn't paid. SkyBon Talk\ Contributions 19:23, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
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I am an outsider less than I am a Wikipedia editor, as I am very new and have only begun to edit articles. So please take that into consideration that this is an outsider's view.
I think that this discussion gets to the heart and soul of Wikipedia. I can understand why Mr. Wales takes the position that he does, as he founded this website and clearly has a utopian and idealistic view of its mission and purpose. The idea that somebody unaffiliated with Wikipedia would use Wikipedia for commercial purposes is antithetical to that view.
I personally don't care one way or the other about that, but I do think that explicitly endorsing paid editing would be very bad for Wikipedia's image, and would remove any tenuous hold it may have on integrity. It is bad enough that Wikipedia has a reputation for inaccuracy. We all know that. It is a subject of ridicule. Were Wikipedia to explicitly allow paid editing, however defined, it would be a green light for swarms of public relations firms to come to Wikipedia on behalf of their clients, both to create articles and to edit the ones that are there.
Some say that Wikipedia's volunteers and policies could prevent paid editing from affecting the content. I disagree. There are millions of articles, the vast majority of which appear to get very little attention from anybody. Some are blatant advertising. Some are obviously written by their subjects. The existence of such articles is bad enough, but I cannot understand why Wikipedia would open the door to even more of them.
As I said, this is the view of an outsider, a new user here, but I think what I am saying would be said by many if not most other people who just use Wikipedia as a source and possibly even trust it. Jay Tepper ( talk) 14:32, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
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Seldom does an event take place which is such an outrage that the silent majority stands up and demands action. But the silent majority is currently demanding that something be done about the wikipedia community request for comments process. But first, let me pose you a question: Is the wikipedia community request for comments process actually concerned about any of us or does it just want to inject even more fear and divisiveness into political campaigns? After reading this letter, you'll really find it's the latter. The foregoing greatly simplifies the real situation but it does indicate in a rough, general way that far too many people tolerate the wikipedia community request for comments process's homilies as long as they're presented in small, seemingly harmless doses. What these people fail to realize, however, is that the hour is late indeed. Fortunately, it's not yet too late to offer true constructive criticism—listening to the whole issue, recognizing the problems, recognizing what is being done right, and getting involved to help remedy the problem. My argument is that the wikipedia community request for comments process takes a perverse pleasure in watching people scurry about like rats in a maze, never quite managing to knock some sense into it. Ridiculous? Not so.
I would decidedly not have thought it possible that even if the wikipedia community request for comments process's sound bites were utterly successful in making a few people feel better, they would still be demeaning to everyone else, but it's true. Life isn't fair. We've all known this since the beginning of time, so why is the wikipedia community request for comments process so compelled to complain about situations over which it has no control? This is not a question that we should run away from. Rather, it is something that needs to be addressed quickly and directly because the wikipedia community request for comments process would have us believe that all it takes to solve our social woes are shotgun marriages, heavy-handed divorce laws, and a return to some mythical 1950s Shangri-la. That, of course, is nonsense, total nonsense. But the wikipedia community request for comments process is surrounded by complacent quiddlers who parrot the same nonsense, which is why it is a wee bit overzealous in its defense of anti-intellectualism. The best example of this, culled from many, would have to be the time it tried to divert our attention from serious issues. The wikipedia community request for comments process maintains that either it can override nature or that obscurantism is a viable and vital objective for our nation's educational institutions. The wikipedia community request for comments process denies any other possibility.
If the wikipedia community request for comments process gets its way, I might very well feel disconnected from reality. Because I unfortunately lack the psychic powers that enable the wikipedia community request for comments process to "know" matters for which there is no reliable evidence, I cannot forecast when it will next try to erode constitutional principles that have shaped our society and remain at the core of our freedom and liberty. But I can definitely say that difficult times lie ahead. Fortunately, we have the capacity to circumvent much of the impending misery by working together to drag the wikipedia community request for comments process in front of a tribunal and try it for its crimes against humanity.
Don't get me wrong; mankind, with all of its accumulated knowledge, wonderful machines, scientific methods, and material power, still has much to fear from laughable, obscene hatemongers like the wikipedia community request for comments process. But the wikipedia community request for comments process once tried convincing me that anyone who disagrees with it is ultimately ruthless. Does it think I was born yesterday? I mean, it seems pretty obvious that that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. I don't mean to throw fuel on an already considerable fire, but the wikipedia community request for comments process's imprecations were never about tolerance and equality. That was just window dressing for the "innocents". Rather, the wikipedia community request for comments process wants to extract obscene salaries and profits from corporations that insist that our society be infested with Pyrrhonism, sensationalism, quislingism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms". What does it think it is? I mean, I would never take a job working for it. Given its infantile teachings, who would want to?
The wikipedia community request for comments process has hatched all sorts of whiney plans. Remember its attempt to substitute pap for art? No? That's because the wikipedia community request for comments process's so good at concealing its irritable activities. It's a well-known fact that the wikipedia community request for comments process's trucklers care more about speaking, acting, and even thinking like the wikipedia community request for comments process than they care about what makes sense. It's an equally well-known fact that the wikipedia community request for comments process quite likes using the old La patrie en danger ruse to garner support for its plan to delegitimize our belief systems and replace them with a counter-hegemony that seeks to till the hostile side of the Comstockism garden. When logic puts these two facts together, the necessary result is an understanding that if it can give us all a succinct and infallible argument proving that "the norm" shouldn't have to worry about how the exceptions feel, I will personally deliver its Nobel Prize for Chthonic Rhetoric. In the meantime, the wikipedia community request for comments process seems to have recently added the word "institutionalization" to its otherwise simplistic vocabulary. I suppose it intends to use big words like that to obscure the fact that there are few certainties in life. I have counted only three: death, taxes, and the wikipedia community request for comments process announcing some backwards thing every few weeks. It is time for someone to make efforts directed towards broad, long-term social change. Will that someone be you?
Maybe it helps to think of this as a dada statement of process appraisal. Privatemusings ( talk) 11:25, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I am an experienced paid editor of content suitable for Wikipedia. When I was under contract with a person or corporation to write a new article about said person or corporation, I had very, very, very little interest in presenting an "advocacy" position on behalf of that entity. Rather, success is measured in durability within Wikipedia, so my highest priority was...
How do I write (and publish) this article in such a way that it passes WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS, and all the other WP:things, while simultaneously NOT DRAWING THE ATTENTION of the Hive?
Guess what? The articles that resulted were pretty bland, not puff pieces, quite encyclopedic, and (ever since I learned this technique) 100% durable within Wikipedia -- with surprisingly little follow-up maintenance, and likewise lasting appreciation of my clients.
That's why I believe those who oppose paid editing are thinking one-dimensionally, and they often feel the need to frame such workers as "paid shills" and other likewise pejorative terms. In order to rally equally one-dimensional followers, critics of paid editing must demonize the paid editing effort; I imagine because it is potentially, in fact, so non-sinister in its undetectability. My paid content was and remains virtually indistinguishable from the other content found on Wikipedia, except for the fact that, perhaps, it is of a higher encyclopedic and "neutral" quality.
I remain unwilling to disclose my still-undetected paid content contributions to Wikipedia (for the obvious reason that I wish not to feed those who seek revenge on me); however, if you wish to see an example of a similarly-written article, then you may visit the article about National Fuel Gas and compare how it started with how it exists presently. This article was written without request nor payment, but it mimics the style of my other paid content contributions.
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Yeah, I'm late to the party.
Paid editing is going to happen. Paid editing is happening. Pretending we can ban it is not realistic.
What we need to do is to get it out in the open so we can monitor the articles for neutrality, COI and so on. I'd favor allowing openly acknowledged paid editing, with the articles being tagged with a template or something, together with a ban on covert paid editing. This would give a powerful incentive for paid editors to do things publicly and above board with no fear of retribution. But if we discover that people are doing it covertly -- and given that they will likely need to advertise, we've got a reasonable chance of finding them sooner or later -- the assumption will be that they've got something to hide. Because they'll have no reason to hide if they're willing to follow our policies. Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 03:10, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
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Contract killings are going to happen. Contract killings are happening. Pretending we can ban them is not realistic. What we need to do is to get it out in the open. We need a policy to regulate contract killers and require them to declare themselves openly. We can offer incentives so that they will identify themselves. Etc., etc., etc. (The same argument, especially the first three sentences, could be made about any other criminal or socially undesirable activity; the latter might actually make closer analogies.) Finell (Talk) 22:43, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
I've got mixed feelings about this. I certainly agree with the viewpoint that paid editing is going on and there's really no way to stop it. I also agree with the sentiment that as long as the resultant articles stick to our policies, then there's no problem. Also, I suppose it isn't all that different from the bounty board. There's just something that bothers me about the notion of people being paid externally to edit Wikipedia. It might be more acceptable to people if it's required that paid users disclose their clients, but there's really no way to enforce that. While editors could be blocked for paid editing, unless the editor him/herself admitted to being paid, it would be nigh impossible to prove. Another thing to consider is that as long as the pages are being reviewed for GA, A, and FA classes, there'll be people checking them for bias. Ultimately, I think we've been presented with a fait accompli; paid editing is going on and we can't stop it. As uncomfortable as it might make some us, the best course of action is to just accept the situation as it is and move on with our wiki-lives. Parsecboy ( talk) 20:15, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
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What can you say about this? It was listed as a good article on January 2009, despite citing primary sources six times and authored by User:Zithan, an editor proven to be hired for doing it. Alexius08 ( talk) 13:22, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
2. He commits to not use any sock-puppets. 3. He commits to abide by all the policies of Wikipedia. -- Gurubrahma ( talk) 16:28, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
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Paid editors are just like any user editing his or her own article. It should be permitted subject to the WP:COI restrictions. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 19:13, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
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